The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has denied Coinbase's claim that it has received formal approval to acquire the brokerage.
The leading American cryptocurrency platform Coinbase has begun a serious journey to obtain broker-dealer status and regulation by the SEC, as well as FINRA. To do this, last month the company bought three brokerage companies at once. This is Keystone Capital Corp, Venovate Marketplace, Inc. and Digital Wealth LLC.
At the beginning of the week, Coinbase rushed to inform Bloomberg that financial market regulators SEC and FINRA had approved the platform's acquisition of three brokerage companies and approved the deal announced last month.
Coinbase is now retracting its claim that it received the green light from the SEC to move forward with the trio of acquisitions and says it never received such approval. An SEC spokesperson also denied that claim.
A spokeswoman for the US Securities and Exchange Commission told Bloomberg that the crypto exchange's statement was incorrect. Coinbase, indeed, consulted with representatives of the department about some of the nuances of the upcoming transaction, but these were private consultations. The department does not issue permits for the transfer of management rights and does not participate in the process of buying/selling companies.
Coinbase is not abandoning its plans, although the timing of the completion of the deal is not yet known. The purchase of brokerage companies will allow the platform to conduct legal brokerage activities and sell security tokens related to securities in accordance with current American legislation.
Coinbase is so committed to a brokerage license because the situation with crypto assets in the American market is becoming more complicated. Today, regulators do not consider bitcoin and ethereum to be securities, but the status of many tokens has not yet been determined.
For example, Ripple is accused of trading in unregistered securities. Further expansion of the listing of crypto-platforms becomes risky without the appropriate license.
According to https://www.bloomberg.com
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