Washington, DC
The SEC takes on crypto: Changpeng Zhao (pictured), the founder of the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, is facing some hard times, says Anita Ramaswamy on Breakingviews. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the markets regulator, is suing Binance for, among other things, inflating trading volumes (known as “wash trading”) and helping US customers to trade illegally in unregulated digital assets. In its defence, Binance says the SEC has been vague on how cryptocurrencies should be regulated and that the regulator is acting beyond its remit. To be fair, Gary Gensler, head of the SEC, has “bent over backward” to avoid explicitly stating which digital assets fall under his agency’s purview. But the charges are, nevertheless, “concerning”, since, as Zhao himself has pointed out, securities exchanges are…
