Illustration by Mitchell Priefer for Decryption
Legal machinations were the theme of the week, keeping Crypto Twitter on the edge of its seat, booing and cheering in equal measure.
On Monday, a federal judge Refusal to expel The SEC's ongoing lawsuit against Coinbase found most of the regulator's key arguments to be “plausible” and generally agreed that the SEC has jurisdiction over much of the cryptocurrency industry.
Coinbase leadership predictably quickly rejected the ruling and clarified that it in no way meant the cryptocurrency exchange had lost, but the case is now heading toward trial.
But legal experts were clearly surprised by the judge in the case — who was at one point He seemed convinced Going through Coinbase's arguments – I found that much of the logic underlying the SEC's arguments is sound.
The uproar around the ruling has become great enough that even Edward Snowden has commented on it, deeming it meaningless and predicting that other rulings and political developments and legal structures in the United States will eventually force the SEC to abandon its enforcement crackdown on huge groups of securities companies. Finance. Crypto industry.
Naturally, the biggest legal news of the week came on Thursday, when disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman Fried went on trial. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison In federal prison for his involvement in criminal fraud on his cryptocurrency exchange.
Details of the sentencing hearing were essentially filtered out of a Manhattan courtroom as they were relayed to the world via a single Twitter account.Inner City Press-any Transcripts of trials in New York City are often live-tweeted.
The transcript of Bankman-Fried's sentencing was full of gems that instantly went viral — from the former billionaire's defense attorney who praised it as a “beautiful mystery” to the case's judge, Louis Kaplan, who denounced the cryptocurrency founder's testimony as the worst he had ever seen from a trial. The defendant has been on the bench for nearly 30 years.
Clearly, many cryptocurrency users consuming live tweets of the sentencing hearing were more accustomed to tracking constantly volatile cryptocurrency prices, rather than following hours-long legal proceedings. After nearly two hours of the hearing — which saw Bankman-Fried, his attorney, the FTX victim, and Judge Kaplan deliver lengthy speeches — some Twitter users reached their limit, desperate for a major announcement on the length of the defendant's sentence.
And soon the news came. When that happened, crypto Twitter was divided — between those who hoped Bankman-Fried would receive a harsher sentence and others who were sentenced to 25 years in prison in the case. Probably a rough federal prison It should be an appropriate punishment for a first-time, non-violent offender.
However, it is clear that the Bankman-Fried ruling marked a historic — and healing — milestone in the cryptocurrency industry, one that was quickly immortalized in… Usually dark and the provocative creativity of digital artist Pebble.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
