The United States Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, has filed a complaint related to a 2017 initial coin offering from a blockchain project originally developed by the Walt Disney Company. In a Tuesday notice, the SEC said it had charged Dragonchain, the Dragonchain Foundation, the Dragon Company, and their founder John Joseph Roets for raising $16.5 million in a presale and initial coin offering from 2017. According to the financial regulator, Roets, Dragonchain, and the Dragonchain Foundation allegedly conducted an unregistered offering of the blockchain’s DRGN tokens in an August 2017 presale and an October and November 2017 ICO, …

The U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued sanctions against Tornado Cash this month, marking its first action against a decentralized finance (DeFi) mixer in what may prove to be a watershed moment for DeFi regulation. A lack of response and regulatory preparation from the industry is perhaps unsurprising of a mindset honed outside the rule of law. Yet, the potential of DeFi is threatened if its leaders do not face the reality that regulation in this space will only increase. Taking steps to work with regulators is now the only way forward. On Aug. 8, OFAC targeted …

Among a rich range of anxieties both for the crypto industry and the global economy at large, the summer of 2022 will be remembered as the time when the stablecoins proved themselves to be not so stable and thus came into the focus of regulators’ attention. The shock of the TerraUSD (UST) depegging in May opened a season of heated-up discussions on stablecoins around the world. The top financial officials from the Group of Seven (G7) largest advanced industrial economies had to send their private jets to the 40,000-populated German town of Koenigswinter to push the international body of the …

Singapore-based crypto lending platform Hodlnaut is seeking judicial management to manage its ongoing liquidity crisis and avoid the forced liquidation of assets in the current bear market. The crypto lender informed its users in a Tuesday announcement that they have applied to the Singapore High Court to be placed under judicial management. The firm said: “We are aiming to avoid a forced liquidation of our assets as it is a suboptimal solution that will require us to sell our users’ cryptocurrencies such as BTC, ETH and WBTC at these current depressed asset prices. Instead, we believe that undergoing judicial management …

Digital asset custodian BitGo said it planned to seek more than $100 million in damages from Galaxy Digital, alleging the investment firm owed the funds as part of a “reverse break fee” in its decision to terminate an acquisition agreement. In a Monday blog post, BitGo referred to Galaxy’s actions as “improper” in claiming a breach of contract to drop an agreement to acquire the digital asset custodian. BitGo has enlisted the services of law firm Quinn Emanuel to pursue legal action against Galaxy for not paying a “$100 million reverse break fee it had promised back in March 2022.” …

United States-based crypto policy advocacy group Coin Center said it intended to “pursue administrative relief” for individuals affected by Tornado Cash sanctions imposed by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control, or OFAC. In a Monday blog post, Coin Center executive director Jerry Brito and director of research Peter Van Valkenburgh alleged OFAC “overstepped its legal authority” when it named cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash and 44 associated wallet addresses to its list of Specially Designated Nationals, or SDNs, on Aug. 8. The directors claimed Treasury’s actions could have potentially violated U.S. residents’ “constitutional rights to due process and free …

For Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin (BTC), the motivation to create a new payment ecosystem from scratch in 2009 stemmed from the economic chaos caused by the banking sector’s over-exuberant and risky lending practices mixed accompanied by the bursting of the housing bubbles in many countries at the time. “And who do you think picked up the pieces after the fallout? The taxpayer, of course,” said Durgham Mushtaha, business development manager of blockchain analytics firm Coinfirm, in an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph. Satoshi recognized the need for a new monetary system based on equity and fairness — a system …

As the global Web3 ecosystem continued to evolve at a staggering pace, so have the various use cases associated with this niche. In a striking new development, a high-ranking Singaporean government minister recently noted that legal marriage proceedings, court case disputes, and government services could one day be conducted using Metaverse platforms. While delivering a keynote address at Singapore’s TechLaw Fest 2022 late last month, the country’s second minister for law, Edwin Tong, was quoted as saying that he would not be surprised if, in the future, intimate events such as the solemnization of marriages as well as legal disputes …

Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested a developer that is suspected to be involved in money laundering through the crypto mixing service Tornado Cash. The Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD), an agency in the Netherlands responsible for investigating financial crimes, officially announced on Friday an arrest of a 29-year-old man in Amsterdam. The man has allegedly been involved in facilitating criminal financial flows and money laundering through the decentralized Ethereum mixer Tornado Cash, the authority said. The FIOD pointed out that it doesn’t rule out multiple arrests in the case, noting that its Financial Advanced Cyber Team (FACT) launched …

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) released a policy brief Wednesday on cryptocurrency. It is the third brief in a row the agency has dedicated to crypto, and together they represent a detailed assessment of the risks crypto presents for developing economies and options for resolving those risks. UNCTAD Policy Brief No. 102, dated July but newly released, argues that although cryptocurrency can facilitate remittances and encourage financial inclusion, it can also undermine domestic resource mobilization in developing economies by enabling tax evasion by hiding the ownership of financial flows and directing them out of the country. …

Cryptocurrency and stock trading platform Robinhood will allegedly face allegations of market manipulation as part of a class-action lawsuit brought by investors in “meme stocks” from 9 different companies during a January 2021 rally. According to a Thursday report from Reuters, United States District Court Judge Cecilia Altonaga of the Southern District of Florida ruled that investors in GameStop, AMC, and 7 other unnamed stocks — which may include Nokia and BlackBerry — could proceed with a lawsuit alleging that Robinhood artificially increased the supply of stocks. In January 2021, the price of several assets including the meme token Dogecoin …

Cryptocurrency derivatives trading platform dYdX said it blocked some users’ accounts with funds linked to Tornado Cash, including mistakenly suspending some that never directly engaged with the controversial mixer. In a Wednesday blog post, dYdX said it had “unbanned certain accounts” that the derivatives platform had blocked in response to the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the United States Treasury Department adding Tornado Cash to its list of Specially Designated Nationals, or SDNs. According to dYdX, its compliance provider flagged many accounts believed to be linked to Tornado Cash which the platform subsequently blocked — despite the fact some …