Crypto billionaire Brian Armstrong or SEC boss Gary Gensler – who’ll win?
Last Updated on 6 November 2023 by CryptoTips.eu
As I’ve been writing a daily crypto article for some years now, I can assure you that the significance of 14 April 2021 is quite big for the cryptosphere. On that day, Bitcoin traded at a record price and Coinbase was listed for the first time on the New York Stock Exchange. From then on, the United States would welcome several new billionaires, namely the founders of the largest American crypto platform Coinbase. Americans liked what they saw and went wild for crypto.
Airbnb
How did Coinbase start? Well, back in 2012 young Brian Armstrong, a software developer who works for a small travel website called Airbnb, reads the Bitcoin white paper for the first time. He is convinced of the usefulness of Bitcoin and starts his own small company, Coinbase, trading crypto.
Fast forward to April 14, 2021 and Brian can call himself a billionaire as from that moment as Coinbase is listed on the stock exchange. His fortune is suddenly worth $ 6.5 billion more than the day before. Three years later and Coinbase stock is only worth a fraction of what it was that day, but Brian is still a billionaire.
Earlier this year, his company applied for a license to operate from Bermuda (since he knows how things ended for Sam Bankman-Fried, the former CEO of the bankrupt crypto platform FTX) and the US stock market watchdog SEC has, as Brian expected for several months , filed a complaint against Coinbase.
Commodities
SEC Chairman Gary Gensler and crypto billionaire Brian Armstrong both made several media appearances this week trying to convince the American public (of whom some 15% invested in crypto) of their position in the SEC versus Coinbase lawsuit.
Gensler calls crypto the ‘wild west’, Armstrong thinks that the fact that so many Americans now own Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) should be enough to regularize things. Furthermore, he claims that 90% of all coins are not even tradable with his company.
The key question that the SEC wants to see answered in their indictment is: how should cryptos be classified: are they commodities, means of payment or investment products? And who should regulate them?
Europe has it’s affairs in order with its Mica regulation, but the US hasn’t gotten that far yet. If the SEC wins against Coinbase, you can therefore expect virtually all major US crypto companies to consider a move to Europe (no matter how attractive operating from Bermuda may seem to Brian).
