Top digital currency platform Coinbase said on Friday that federal regulators will toss a lawsuit brought during the Biden administration that sought to tighten its grip on crypto assets.
“It’s a great day for Coinbase and for crypto,” said Paul Grewal, Coinbase’s chief legal officer. “We were committed to defending it to the gates of hell, for as long as it took and for as much money as it took.”
An SEC spokesman declined to comment.
The move comes after President Donald Trump vowed to take a lighter-touch approach to regulating cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin during last year’s presidential election campaign.
The 47th president started selling his digital token last month, which currently has a market value of just over $3 billion.
The rare U-turn by the feds would still need to be formally rubber-stamped in a vote by SEC officials, but Coinbase believes it will happen next week.
The SEC, under former chair Gary Gensler, sued the firm in 2023, accusing it of acting like a stock exchange and breaking laws meant to protect investors.
Gensler had provoked the ire of crypto and digital investors for what they saw as an overly aggressive stance in trying to regulate the industry in the same way as the rest of Wall Street.
A source close to the commander-in-chief previously told The Post in November that the SEC under Gensler’s leadership “had gone rogue” as investors complained of “a turf war” with fellow regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
In another boost to the crypto industry, Acting SEC Chairman Mark Uyeda said Thursday that he will break up Gensler’s special enforcement unit.
He also took a thinly veiled swipe at Gensler, vowing to “deploy enforcement resources judiciously.”
Trump’s pick to become the next permanent chair of the SEC is Paul Atkins, a pro-crypto lawyer who served as an SEC commissioner in the George W. Bush administration.
Atkins must first face a confirmation hearing before the Senate Banking Committee before the rest of the upper house can vote on whether he should take up the position.
A date has not yet been set for the hearing.
