This week in the crypto world, we saw Stripe bring crypto back, Satoshi Nakamoto not get revealed, and the SEC sued…twice.
About time.
Stripe Dives Back Into Crypto
Payment giant Stripe this week reentered the crypto game six years after it left. The company’s produce lead, Jeff Weinstein, announced that the company had honored its pledge to get back in the game through the integration of USDC payments.
Stripe revealed that it was jumping back into the shark pool in April having dropped Bitcoin support in 2018. Stripe introduced Bitcoin payments in 2014 but ditched it following regulatory concerns.
HBO Misses the Mark With Satoshi ‘Reveal’
HBO made an ass of itself this week when it aired a documentary that claimed to reveal the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. “Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery” fingered Canadian Bitcoin developer Peter Todd as the man behind the pseudonym, only for many Bitcoin luminaries to scoff at the connection, suggesting that the evidence put forward is flimsy at best.
Todd himself also denied the claim, and the ‘evidence’ used to point to Todd was only marginally more convincing than that used by Craig Wright, which tells you all you need to to know.
SEC Hit With Two Lawsuits
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was hit with two lawsuits this week, giving it a taste of its own medicine, including a novel one regarding XRP.
The first to sue was exchange giant Crypto.com, which was responding to a Wells Notice served on it in August. The exchange decried the agency’s “unlawful expansion” of its regulatory reach, claiming that the SEC has exceeded its authority by regulating secondary-market sales of tokens as securities. Crypto.com’s lawsuit seeks to halt the SEC’s enforcement actions against these tokens, arguing that such digital assets are not securities under existing U.S. law.
Days later, another exchange, Bitnomial, launched a preemptive lawsuit against the agency, arguing that XRP, the underlying asset of a futures contract it wants to launch, is not a security and wants to make sure that the SEC can’t shut it down on this basis.
How the turntables.
