This is not the end of Coinbase or crypto.
If staking is deemed to be a security, it will have an impact on crypto, and as far as I understand, it means that PoS coins would need to be registered with the SEC as securities, or potentially Coinbase would be the registered party required to govern the coins they offer to stake.
Am I understanding this correctly?
Coinbase has argued that all they are doing is providing IT services to do what their customers could do on their own. How well that holds up in court really depends on the arguments that the SEC makes, and how the courts views Coinbase's response.
Disclaimer: I own some COIN shares (to get exposure to crypto without having to own crypto.). Aside: Coinbase had dropped ~6% during the day before the notice and has dropped a further ~13% in after-hours trading since the after-hours SEC notice.
https://www.coinbase.com/blog/we-asked-the-sec-for-reasonabl...
Today, we are disappointed to share that the SEC gave us a “Wells notice” regarding an unspecified portion of our listed digital assets, our staking service Coinbase Earn, Coinbase Prime, and Coinbase Wallet after a cursory investigation.
What happens if Coinbase is cut off from banking? FTX was a total scam; Coinbase is a completely legitimate company—the only really, deeply, compliant exchange. Once CB cannot bank, the precedent is set—no one in crypto can touch the banking system. Forever. And as we’ll see, it doesn’t even need to be forever.
Edit: the parent comment previously made the claim that this was predicted by various unrelated claims in a linked blog post, and later modified it to make it appear they were not making that association.
Nice, maybe this should be tried to deal with inflation instead of rising interest rates.
