As the cryptocurrency space continues to grow, laws and regulations continue to attack this seemingly unstoppable technology. This current war has had a fight with many victims such as Ripple (XRP) and Terra (LUNA). And as of today, it has found its next challenger, the second-largest cryptocurrency in the game. Ethereum (ETH).
Attorney General (AG) Letitia James of New York has officially made the claim that Ethereum (ETH) is a security because it “…is a speculative asset that relies on the efforts of third-party developers in order to provide profit to the holders of ETH.” This claim comes a short few months after ETH made its switch from PoW to PoS which allows users to earn financial rewards by HODL’ing their tokens.
To add onto this, the AG has officially filed a lawsuit against popular crypto exchange KuCoin. Allegedly, for “falsely representing itself as an exchange” when it is really a “security and commodities broker-dealer”. What is she looking for in this lawsuit? To block access to the exchange in the state of NY by forcing KuCoin to allow access to its website based on IP and GPS location. Something similar happened to another exchange as well, Kraken and CoinEx, where the former were fined $30 million, and the latter is currently in a lawsuit now. Both involving the SEC accusing them of being “securities and commodities broker-dealers.”
ETH has become a household name and a major player in the Web3 space. This will be an interesting case to see how they handle this as the government continues to crackdown on this anti-crypto nonsense. Will they be able to pull themselves up and take back control?
