SEC Reportedly Plans to Eliminate Regional Director Role as Part of Cost-Cutting

US SEC plans to cut regional directors as agency prepares for DOGE scrutiny, sources say

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission plans to remove the top leaders at regional offices across the country as part of its cost-cutting recommendations to the Trump administration, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

The SEC on Friday told directors across its 10 regional offices that their roles will be eliminated as part of the plan the agency submits next month, the sources told Reuters. […]

The SEC, which oversees the more than $100 trillion U.S. capital markets, is under pressure from Republican President Donald Trump to fire staff and slash costs. Agency leaders have been told to submit recommendations for steep cuts to the administration. Some of the government’s cost-cutting efforts have involved the new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and Musk. […]

“The regional leadership is what the home office has always looked to for making decisions about enforcement cases and exams. This is a difficult layer to remove,” said Andrew M. Calamari, a partner with Finn Dixon & Herling LLP and former director of the SEC’s New York office.

SEC Closes Investigation Into Robinhood Crypto with No Action

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has officially closed its investigation into Robinhood Crypto (RHC). On February 21, 2025, the SEC’s Enforcement Division advised RHC in a letter that it had concluded its investigation and did not intend to move forward with an enforcement action. This follows the SEC’s May 2024 Wells Notice to RHC.

“We applaud the staff’s decision to close this investigation with no action,” said Dan Gallagher, Chief Legal, Compliance and Corporate Affairs Officer, Robinhood Markets, Inc. “Let me be crystal clear—this investigation never should have been opened. Robinhood Crypto always has and will always respect federal securities laws and never allowed transactions in securities. As we explained to the SEC, any case against Robinhood Crypto would have failed. We appreciate the formal closing of this investigation, and we are happy to see a return to the rule of law and commitment to fairness at the SEC.”

Elizabeth Holmes’ Fraud Conviction Upheld by Ninth Circuit

Elizabeth Holmes lost her last-ditch effort to overturn her 2022 fraud conviction when a federal appeals court Monday upheld the judgment against the disgraced Theranos Inc. founder.

A three-judge panel for the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco also upheld the conviction of her former business and romantic partner Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, and it upheld the $452 million restitution order the duo must pay to 14 vicitims.

Judge Jacqueline H. Nguyen, writing for the unanimous court, largely rejected arguments by Holmes and Balwani that prosecutors’ key witnesses were improperly vetted by the trial judge, and that their testimonies were “infected with error.”

Crypto 2.0: The New Administration Recasts the Landscape for Crypto

Meanwhile, the commission has put the brakes on enforcement activity. On Feb. 20, the SEC announced the creation of the Cyber and Emerging Technologies Unit, replacing the Enforcement Division’s Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit. This rebranded unit, which has been significantly reduced in size from its former iteration, will “focus on combatting cyber-related misconduct and protecting retail investors from bad actors in the emerging technologies space,” including artificial intelligence, machine learning, blockchain technology, and crypto. The clear message from the SEC is that crypto is a small part of the new enforcement unit’s mandate and that any future enforcement investigations will be cases involving fraud or manipulation—as opposed to the types of registration-focused cases the SEC brought against firms like Ripple and Coinbase (where the commission asserted that the companies ran afoul of the securities laws merely by failing to register with the commission). As for the SEC’s ongoing litigations, commission staff is currently seeking stays or deadline extensions to allow the task force to develop a position on whether and how the commission will proceed with active cases. We expect most, if not all, of these litigations to be resolved on terms favorable to the defendants or even dismissed outright.

FTT Briefly Spikes After Sam Bankman-Fried Tweets for First Time in 2 Years

The token associated with defunct crypto exchange FTX surged briefly Monday night after Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and onetime CEO of the platform tweeted for the first time in two years.

Bankman-Fried, who was convicted on seven different counts of fraud and conspiracy in November 2023, is serving out a 25-year prison sentence. He’s currently detained in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn as his lawyers work through an appeal of his conviction. Still, his account on X (formerly Twitter) posted a 10-tweet thread about layoffs, seemingly referencing Elon Musk’s push to have federal employees email their work activities from the past week or risk resignations.