The blockchain and digital asset landscape continued to evolve in 2020. DeFi grew exponentially, venture funds are highly active, state and international jurisdictions are vying for crypto business, a crypto lawyer is head of the OCC, and Bitcoin has almost become mainstream. With the SEC, CFTC, FinCEN, DOJ, and the…
Read our full Client Alert here. Christmas came early for many in the digital asset community by way of a statement from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on December 23, 2020 that grants relief in the area of broker “custody” of digital asset securities. The framework laid out by the…
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Jay Clayton announced that December 23, 2020 would be his last day at the helm of the agency. This leads to the likely outcome that SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, or potentially Commissioner Elad Roisman, will serve as interim Chair until approximately January 20,…
In early November 2020, the staff of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) Division of Investment Management (“IM Division”), in consultation with the SEC’s “FinHub” staff, issued a statement in response to a No-Action Letter from the Wyoming Division of Banking purporting to provide interpretive guidance on both Wyoming…
***This article was originally published in CoinDesk and can be found here – https://www.coindesk.com/bitmex-risks-for-defi In October, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed enforcement actions against the entities and individuals that own and operate the Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange (BitMEX), a trading platform for cryptocurrency…
On Monday, November 16, 2020, SEC Chairman Jay Clayton announced his intention to depart from the agency by the end of 2020. News of Clayton’s decision comes as no real surprise, as it is typical for the SEC Chair to hand the reigns to a successor around the time of…
Please note, this is a summary to the article originally published in Fintech Futures. PayPal, which has 346 million customers and accounts for nearly 14% of online payments nationally, has announced that its U.S. customers will be able to buy, sell and hold a selection of cryptocurrencies via its digital…
Please note, the below is a summary based off the article originally published in Forbes. Diginex (EQOS), the Singapore-based digital assets group, went public with a Nasdaq listing last week. It is the first digital assets group with a crypto exchange to publicly launch in the U.S., selecting Nasdaq as…
On October 8, 2020, the Attorney General’s Cyber Digital Task Force announced the release of a publication entitled Cryptocurrency: An Enforcement Framework (the “Enforcement Framework”). The Enforcement Framework describes the DOJ’s three areas of focus for illicit activity involving cryptocurrency: (1) financial transactions associated with the commission of crimes; (2)…
In 2020, the price of gold has jumped over 30 percent from $1,517 per ounce on January 3, 2020 to over $2,000 per ounce on August 6, 2020. The spike in the price of gold isn’t yet at the level reached in the 2017 Bitcoin boom when the price of…