SEC Agrees to Dismiss Lawsuit Against Kraken with Prejudice

Crypto exchange Kraken says SEC will drop lawsuit

Staff members at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission have “agreed in principle” to drop their lawsuit against the cryptocurrency exchange Kraken, signaling a “turning point” for U.S. crypto regulation under the Trump administration, the company announced Monday.

The financial regulator has in recent weeks dismissed or paused several cases against cryptocurrency platforms, including Robinhood’s crypto unit, as the Trump administration has signaled its intent to take a friendlier approach to the industry.

The SEC agreed to dismiss the Kraken case with prejudice — meaning it can’t be reopened — with no imposition of penalties by the SEC and no admission of wrongdoing by Kraken, the company said. This marks a turnaround from 2023, when the SEC charged the company with acting as an unregistered securities exchange, broker, dealer and clearing agency.

GSA to Nix SEC’s LA, Philadelphia Leases With Telework Possible

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s Los Angeles and Philadelphia regional offices could close in coming months as part of an effort by the General Services Administration to reduce federal government office space and related costs.

The GSA plans to terminate those two leases, the SEC’s Chief Operating Officer Ken Johnson told staff in an email Monday that was reviewed by Bloomberg. […]

The GSA is also looking to terminate the lease of the Chicago regional office, though the regulator said it had informed the GSA that terminating the lease could result in significant financial penalties, the email said.

The GSA plans to empty the Chicago and Philadelphia offices by August and the Los Angeles one by September, according to Johnson’s email. If new office space isn’t obtained by then, staff will move to full-time telework.

Coinbase Files FOIA Request for SEC’s Crypto Expenditures

Coinbase submitted a Freedom of Information Act request on Monday to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to account for how much its “regulation-by-enforcement campaign waged against crypto companies under former Chair Gary Gensler” has cost taxpayers. […]

Jason H. Gart, vice president of research firm History Associates Inc., wrote on behalf of Coinbase that it has reviewed the SEC’s recent publicly available congressional reports and is seeking to obtain documentation regarding the agency’s previous and ongoing investigations and enforcement in connection with digital assets in four areas: first, the offer and sale of any digital asset; second, secondary market transactions in any digital assets; third, digital asset staking; and fourth, digital asset lending.

And Coinbase is seeking to uncover information, such as the cost of how many investigations and enforcement actions the SEC brought; how many employees worked on these investigations; and how many third-party contractors the agency used.

Citigroup Copy-Paste Error Almost Sent $6 Billion to Wealth Account

Citigroup Inc. almost shifted about $6 billion to a customer’s account by accident after a staffer handling the transfer copied and pasted the account number into a field for the dollar figure.

The near-miss in Citigroup’s wealth-management business magnified the intended amount by more than a thousand times and was detected on the next business day, according to people familiar with the matter. It happened in April, the same month that another part of the bank accidentally credited $81 trillion to a different client.

SEC “Reverse-Sweep” Spotlight: Kraken (And How the SEC Has Ironically Become the Worst and Most Culpable Grifter In History)

Bruce Carton of Securities Docket has labelled the SEC’s radical crypto-turnabout a “Reverse-Sweep” (antithetical to the SEC’s enforcement sweeps of yesteryear) while lone Democratic SEC Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw has ridiculed the new SEC posture as “regulation by non-enforcement.”

Whatever the new catch-phrase or nomenclature, the SEC’s comprehensive and indiscriminate dismantling of its crypto-enforcement program is not just unprecedented and irresponsible — its regulatory heresy. […]

Welcome to the golden age of fraud, where crypto-charlatons run-free, wreaking FOMO financial havoc upon innocent investors, while the once-storied SEC not only stands by and lets it all happen, but also gleefully celebrates the genesis of a phantasmagorical SEC/Big Crypto partnership.