Jon Stewart's Deep Dive on SEC Enforcement

Crypto booster Sen. Lummis says she agrees with SEC Chair Gensler that most digital assets are securities

U.S. Securities and Exchange Chairman Gary Gensler has won the ire of many in the crypto community by arguing that the vast majority of digital tokens are securities and that their issuers are violating the law by not registering with the agency.

Republican Sen. Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming said Tuesday “I agree with him” on this point, during a live interview with the Washington Post.

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Lummis emphasized, however, that bitcoin and ether, which account for about 65% of the total cryptocurrency market capitalization, are obviously commodities that should be regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. She added that because there are possibly as many as 19,000 individual cryptocurrencies and that it’s likely that most are securities.

ESG Task Force “Lifts the Vale” on Its Scrutiny of ESG Disclosures

The SEC’s approach to the Vale litigation provides a roadmap for public companies to consider how ESG-related disclosures and statements will be scrutinized when the company is impacted by adverse events that are ESG-related. It illustrates that companies should be prepared for the SEC to closely scrutinize statements about risk in ESG disclosures such as sustainability reports or climate impact analyses. This post discusses the SEC’s case against Vale and real-world “lessons learned” for all public companies when publishing materials about ESG, climate, and operational risks.

SEC Investigating UST Stablecoin Blowup in Fresh Threat to TerraThe US Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether the marketing of the TerraUSD stablecoin before it crashed last month violated federal investor-protection regulations, according to a person familiar with the matter.

SEC enforcement attorneys are looking into whether Terraform Labs, the firm behind the coin also known as UST, broke rules for securities and investment products, said the person who asked not to be named discussing the confidential probe. The stablecoin was supposed to maintain a 1-to-1 peg to the US dollar through an algorithm and trading in a related token called Luna.

Mike Novogratz Says Two-Thirds of Crypto Hedge Funds Will Fail Mike Novogratz, the founder and chief executive officer of Galaxy Digital Holdings Ltd., said two-thirds of the hedge funds that invest in cryptocurrencies will fail as a consequence of the current market downturn.

“Volume will go down, hedge funds will have to restructure,” Novogratz said at the Piper Sandler Global Exchanges & Brokerage Conference in New York. “There are literally 1,900 crypto hedge funds. My guess is two-thirds will go out of business.”