Mark Cuban, Billionaire, Says SEC Treating Crypto Differently

Mark Cuban, a famous billionaire investor, thinks that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is treating crypto differently than it does other businesses.

The owner of the Dallas Mavericks uses the SEC’s approach to the stock loan business as an example of how the regulator seems to be using its power differently against the crypto space.

“Note, they are not calling ‘stock loans’ a security as they are trying to do with the loaning of crypto assets. Nor are they suing the stock loan departments of brokers/banks. They are going through a comments process. They should do the same thing with crypto as an effort to determine which aspects of crypto are securities and which are not and the best way to regulate the industry and protect investors. I think their difference in approach is emblematic of their intent for one industry vs. another.”

Cuban also says that the SEC’s public documents make it “nearly impossible” to know which crypto assets are stocks.

The SEC sued Binance and its CEO Changpeng Zhao last week for what the head of the federal agency, Gary Gensler, called “an extensive web of deception, conflicts of interest, lack of disclosure, and calculated evasion of the law.”

The regulator also says that Binance’s native token, BNB, and other “crypto asset securities,” like Binance’s native token, were offered and sold without being listed. It also mentioned a number of other tokens that it considers to be “crypto asset securities.” These include Cardano (ADA) and Solana (SOL), which compete with Ethereum (ETH), and Polygon (MATIC), which is a scaling solution for blockchains.

The SEC also sued the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the US, Coinbase, on Tuesday, saying that the business was acting as an unregistered securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency.