Attorneys for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have requested a delay until February 2025 to submit “hundreds of thousands of documents” in their legal battle with Coinbase.
On September 18, the SEC filed a motion with the Southern District Court of New York requesting that the deadline for filing documents be brought forward by four months from October 18.
The request comes after Coinbase partially granted a discovery request seeking details on how securities laws apply to tokens.
The SEC said it had reviewed more than 133,000 unique documents and that the extension would provide the necessary time to comply with the court order.
If approved by Judge Katherine Failla, the SEC’s deadline for filing documents would be February 18, 2025, with a new deadline for expert discovery set for April 22, 2025. The trial could not begin until 2025.
The legal battle is part of a broader battle between the SEC and various crypto exchanges. US lawmakers are weighing the SEC’s role in crypto regulation. The Digital Assets Subcommittee has weighed in on whether SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s approach is overly political.
The SEC is also involved in major lawsuits against Coinbase, as well as Ripple Labs, Terraform Labs, and Binance. It’s unclear how potential changes in SEC leadership after the 2024 US elections will impact these cases.