Coinbase says Trump’s SEC has ended its enforcement case against the crypto company

Coinbase says that the SEC has agreed to end an enforcement case that accused it of illegally running an unregistered securities exchange. This could signal a major change in how the US government will enforce the crypto market now that Trump is in office. The lawsuit, which was filed during the Biden administration, has long-been considered an attempt to bring the crypto industry under the same investor-protection rules that govern stocks and other securities.

Coinbase had been fighting the lawsuit on the grounds that it didn’t run a securities company, likening the commodities it sells to baseball cards. That appeal will soon be moot, assuming the SEC officially votes to dismiss the suit. This should happen next week.

“It’s a great day for Coinbase and for crypto,” Paul Grewal, Coinbase’s chief legal officer, told The Wall Street Journal. “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.”

Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong went on CNBC’s Squawk Box and said that the company will not be paying a fine of any kind. He also said the agreement to end the case marks a “huge day” for Coinbase and that it will cause a “domino effect for the rest of the industry.” He also blamed the original suit on a “small group of activists in this prior administration.”

This move doesn’t come as a huge surprise, given President Trump’s recent embrace of crypto. He even has his own digital coin. To that end, the SEC has already started to break up the special enforcement unit that was devoted to investigating crypto organizations. Coinbase and its rivals spent millions of dollars throughout the last election cycle to help elect crypto-friendly lawmakers. It looks like that investment is paying off.

Acting SEC Chairman Mark Uyeda recently said that the organization would now “deploy enforcement resources judiciously” when investigating crypto companies. He also said that a new task force would be moving away from the commission's previous approach toward the crypto market.

Republican House and Senate lawmakers are working on legislation that would reclassify cryptocurrencies as commodities, according to The Wall Street Journal. This change would likely hand oversight of crypto assets to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is a much smaller agency than the SEC. The CFTC is actually smaller than ever right now, given that the Trump administration laid off a bunch of employees earlier this week.

The crypto market is certainly responding favorably to all of this news. Coinbase’s stock price is up, and the same goes for Robinhood. Rival market Binance even restored fiat deposits and withdrawals this week, which were suspended in 2023 after the SEC sued the company for violations of securities laws.

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