The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has long been known for its tough stance against crypto companies. The SEC, which has come to the fore with accusations regarding “crypto asset securities” in particular, has recently attracted attention with a statement it made.

In the new indictment prepared against the Binance exchange, the agency stated that the term “crypto asset security”, which it had previously used frequently, actually refers to all contracts, expectations and agreements regarding the sale of these assets, not the digital assets themselves.

The SEC claims that it used this term as an “abbreviation” and did not mean that crypto assets were directly securities. Moreover, it stated that they have always adopted this approach and supported it by referring to additional texts in the Telegram case. However, it added that the SEC would avoid this expression in the Binance case and apologized for “any confusion”.

Experts in the crypto world found this statement quite surprising. Variant Fund’s Chief Legal Officer Jake Chervinsky expressed his reaction on the X platform, saying, “I didn’t know this kind of extreme deception was even possible.” Coinbase’s Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal, on the other hand, drew attention to the fact that the SEC defined XRP as a “digital asset security” on the first page of its lawsuit against Ripple. Ripple’s Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty also criticized the SEC’s contradictions, stating that the agency should now “accept that it has become a tangle of contradictions.”