SEC COMMISSIONER MARK UYEDA SAYS THE AGENCY DROPPED AT LEAST A DOZEN CRYPTO CASES BECAUSE ARGUING A 180-DEGREE REVERSAL IN COURT WOULD HAVE COST IT CREDIBILITY

SEC Commissioner Mark Uyeda spoke at Georgetown’s Financial Markets Quality Conference on September 23. He was asked why the agency dropped its crypto enforcement cases in early 2025, when he was running it as acting chair. His answer: “I’m not about to have our litigators...stand up in court and have a commission interpretation be issued that is a 180-degree change from what they’d been arguing for that court. I think that hurts [our] credibility as an agency.”

Count what went away. Coinbase on February 21, 2025. Kraken and Consensys on March 27. Ripple, Binance, Robinhood, Gemini, Uniswap Labs, Cumberland DRW, Crypto.com, Immutable, OpenSea, Yuga Labs. At least a dozen, most dismissed with prejudice, which means they cannot be brought again. Fox Business reporter Eleanor Terrett first relayed the remarks from the conference.

Read the reason he gave. Not that the cases were weak. Not that the companies had done nothing wrong. The stated reason is that the commission had changed its mind, and a lawyer forced to argue the opposite of last year’s position in front of the same judge makes the agency look bad. The defendants’ conduct is not the variable in that sentence. The agency’s posture is.

Hold onto that the next time someone tells you a rule is settled. These were cases the government brought, in court, on the record, and they ended because the government’s reading of its own statute turned around. Bitcoin’s rules do not turn around when the chair changes. That is not a slogan. It is the difference between a rule you can check and a policy you have to trust. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $84,252.