In what could be a major setback for cryptocurrency ecosystem, the developers of Solana (SOL) are caught in legal crosshairs. The recent crisis around crypto credit environment is already proving to be costly for the crypto and blockchain community.
Mark Young, a California based SOL investor filed a lawsuit against the Solana developers, claiming that the tokens are ‘unregistered securities‘. The lawsuit claims Solana Labs, the Solana Foundation and Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of the project as defendants. The plaintiff’s argues that the Solana developers violated U.S. securities laws in sale of the SOL securities.
“Defendants made enormous profits through the sale of SOL securities to retail investors in the United States. This is in violation of the registration provisions of federal and state securities laws. And the investors have suffered enormous losses.”
Last month, Senators Cynthia Lummis and Kirsten Gillibrand unveiled the Responsible Financial Innovation Act, which talks about the regulatory ambit of crypto assets. The draft bill calls for bringing crypto under purview of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), rather than the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The lawsuit claims that the Solana developers deliberately made misleading statements about the total circulating supply of SOL securities. The Solana initial coin offering in April 2020 gave the developers funds to promote SOL project, it said. “As a result of these promotional efforts, SOL securities reached a peak price of $258 per token, with a market capitalization of more than $77 billion, on November 5, 2021.”
The plaintiff claims Yakovenko admitted that Solana did not disclose information about Solana total supply and circulating supply. The irregularities happened during the CoinList auction and the subsequent Binance listing, it added.
The lawsuit stated that the promotions took SOL from “relatively obscure crypto-asset to one of top crypto-assets in the world.”
Meanwhile, the Solana (SOL) price showed improvement this week with a 16.44% rise over the last 7 days. As of writing, SOL price stood at $37.80, up 3.04% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinMarketCap.
Rep. Max Miller is circulating a 14-page draft of a proposed crypto tax bill in…
Ripple engineer Edward Hennis has provided key details about the upcoming XRP Ledger (XRPL) lending…
Strategy co-founder Michael Saylor earlier this week commented on the risk of quantum computing to…
Ethereum is under new sell pressure after a high-profile crypto trader sold his ETH assets…
If you’re a German gambler tired of strict limits and slow payouts at locally licensed…
Top asset manager Fundstrat has advised its private clients to expect a pullback in Bitcoin…