Original | Odaily Planet Daily

Author | jk

On Friday, June 28th, local time in the United States, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against Consensys in the federal court in Brooklyn, New York, accusing the company of "engaging in the sale and sale of securities" and "acting as an unregistered broker" through its digital asset wallet named MetaMask.

Scope of SEC's crackdown

The complaint states: "Consensys violated federal securities laws by failing to register as a broker and failing to register the offer and sale of certain securities. Consensys, as an unregistered broker, collected over $250 million in fees through this conduct."

According to The Block, the SEC stated that Consensys sold thousands of unregistered securities through staking providers Lido and Rocket Pool, which would issue liquid staking tokens named stETH and rETH upon receiving staked assets. Investors would provide ETH to Lido and Rocket Pool, which would then be pooled and staked on the blockchain to obtain returns that investors might not be able to obtain individually.

The SEC stated: "After receiving investors' ETH, Lido and Rocket Pool would respectively issue new encrypted assets to investors—stETH or rETH, representing investors' proportional rights in the staking pool and its returns." Lido and Rocket Pool were sold and offered as investment contracts, and therefore are securities," the agency added.

In April, Consensys attempted to preempt SEC action in Texas with its own lawsuit, accusing the regulatory agency of overstepping its authority. So far this year, the SEC has issued Wells notices, filed lawsuits, or reached settlement agreements with several cryptocurrency companies focused on Ethereum and decentralized finance, including ShapeShift, TradeStation, and Uniswap, while also investigating the Ethereum Foundation.

Response from Consensys

Consensys claimed that they had:

"fully anticipated that the SEC would claim that our MetaMask software interface must be registered as a securities broker. The SEC has been advancing an anti-crypto agenda through enforcement by temporary action. This is just the latest example of its regulatory overreach—transparent attempts to redefine existing legal standards through litigation and expand the SEC's jurisdiction. We are confident in our position that the SEC has no authority to regulate software interfaces like MetaMask. We will continue to actively pursue our case in Texas, as the resolution of these issues is not only about our company, but also about the future success of Web3."

Just 10 days ago, Consensys announced a victory in its battle with the SEC. The company stated in a declaration on June 18th: "The SEC's enforcement division notified us that it will end its investigation into Ethereum 2.0 and will not take enforcement action against Consensys." Odaily published an article this week summarizing the views of various lawyers in the related article " SEC's investigation into ETF 2.0 just ended, but the lawyers are arguing".

Perspective

The SEC's actions in this matter are now clear. It is highly likely, as most people have said, that the approval of Ethereum ETFs comes from political pressure, but the SEC has indeed followed up on Ethereum and other public chains, proving its intention and determination to classify Ethereum and others as securities and establish its regulatory jurisdiction.

Therefore, the SEC chose to send a cease-and-desist letter to Consensys regarding the investigation into Ethereum itself (the letter also contains many ambiguous statements, such as stating the end of the investigation but not necessarily agreeing with Consensys' views in the case), while suspending the matter and reserving the right to continue to pursue whether other public chain tokens are securities in the future (because other public chain tokens are not as decentralized as Ethereum), and choosing to meet Consensys in court regarding the staking matter.

Although there is no definitive conclusion as to whether staking is considered a security; based on the Howey test, whether the returns come from "the efforts of others" or purely from market speculation, or assets generated by on-chain contracts? In this way, the SEC actually has two avenues to continue legally pursuing other tokens, either by asserting that the tokens themselves are securities or by asserting that token staking is a security.

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