The ongoing legal battles between crypto firms and the United States securities regulator will likely fade away with Donald Trump reelected as the 47th president of the United States, Consensys CEO Joe Lubin said.
“So my guess is, in a way that is not embarrassing, they figure out ways to get the cases dismissed or settled, or something like that,” Lubin told Cointelegraph at DevCon 2024 in Thailand.
Joe Lubin sits down with Cointelegraph’s Andrew Fenton. Source: Cointelegraph
“Maybe not all the cases, maybe not all elements of the case, but I have a feeling that our industry is going to save hundreds of millions of dollars going forward,” he said.
Lubin’s comments came after Trump won the presidential election on Nov. 5. Trump’s win was applauded by the crypto industry due to several pro-crypto promises he made throughout his election campaign.
One promise in particular was to “fire” the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair and crypto critic Gary Gensler on day one. There is also growing optimism that Trump will fill his cabinet with “pro-crypto” individuals.
Trump is ‘moving aggressively’
“I think the Trump transition team is already moving aggressively,” he said. “Trump is a pretty good politician,” Lubin declared before adding, “Whatever you say about him, he picks up on the zeitgeist and runs with it.”
This is a significant win for the crypto industry, especially within the US, as the SEC has been locked in ongoing legal battles with major crypto exchanges, including Binance and Coinbase, along with a back-and-forth case against Ripple since December 2020.
Lubin touched on Consensys’ filing a lawsuit against the SEC and its five commissioners in April over claims the regulator planned to regulate ETH as a security.
Consensys lawsuit ‘lit a fire,’ Lubin says
“I think our lawsuit lit a fire. That fire was picked up by law,” he said. In the filing, Consensys alleged the SEC had orchestrated a campaign “to seize control over the future of cryptocurrency” with enforcement actions aimed at regulating Ether as a security.
Lubin said the SEC was attempting to argue that Ethereum 2.0 is different from the “old” Ether:
“I think what they were trying to do was say, Ether under Ethereum 2.0 is a different thing than Ether, and also that old Ether, fine, whatever Bill Hinman said, We don’t care. Call it a commodity, but this new Ether is obviously a security.”
On Sept. 19, a Texas federal judge dismissed Consensys’ lawsuit against the SEC and its five commissioners.
A separate case brought on by the SEC against Consensys shortly after the initial filing is still ongoing.
The SEC alleged that the company has been operating as an unregistered broker and engaging in the unregistered offer and sale of securities through MetaMask Swaps.
Recently, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said the next chair of the SEC should apologize to Americans for the agency’s damage to the crypto space.
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