 It moves remarkably fast and today is no exception. I gotta tell you, in the last 24 hours, actually, since I woke up this morning, it has been quite a little roller coaster ride. So we're gonna talk about what I thought was inevitable, which is the SEC is suing finance. So let's just jump into it. Now, a lot of people have been talking about this today. I have been glued to the set, taking a look at Twitter and all the different things that are coming out. And I have to tell you, it's a lot of assumptions and that's just how it is because of the nature of the beast. But this, in all honesty, is something that I always thought was going to happen. I thought it was inevitable. And quite honestly, I wasn't even gonna do a live stream on it because when I saw it, I go, well, that's just par for the course. But it seems like a lot of people are concerned about it. So here we go. So here is the actual legal documentation for the SEC filing against finance and suing them for specific instances. Now, I have listed this in the description. You're welcome to read through it. It's 136 pages, which we will go through in detail page by page right now. Now I'm just kidding. That would be way too much work. And thankfully for you, I've already gone through all of it and I'll just give you the highlights. Now, people have been talking about it already so you probably know a bunch of this. But this is all about Binance and BAM Trading. BAM Trading is a subsidiary of Binance US, it looks like, or Binance, I should say. And it's just interesting just how much work was put into this document and just how thorough the US government is. I gotta tell you, it's quite astounding. But it states here, BAM Trading Employees Referred to Zows and Binance Control of BAM Trading's operation is shackles that prevent BAM Trading employees from understanding and freely conducting the business of running and operating the business or Binance US platform. So much so that by November 2020, BAM Trading's CEO told Binance's chief financial officer that her entire team feels like it had been duped into being a puppet. There is a lot of quotes in here which makes you wonder exactly how the US government, SEC got so many direct quotes and there's a plethora of them. And it's just like they, maybe there's spies everywhere. Who knows? When the Binance US platform launched in 2019, Binance was implementing controls to block US customers from the Binance platform. In reality, Binance are the opposite. Zao directed Binance to assist certain high value US customers in circumventing those controls and do so surreptitiously because as Zao, CZ himself acknowledged Binance didn't want to be held accountable for these actions. Binance CCO explained on the surface, we cannot be seen to have US users, but in reality, we should get them through other creative means. I don't know who the CCO is, but I gotta tell you, this was a direct quote from the CCO. It states as Binance's CCO bluntly admitted to another Binance compliance officer in December 2018, we are operating a f-ing unlicensed securities exchange in the USA Bro. I gotta tell you, it's, first of all, they have to prove that this was actually said. They have to go through the court of law and they have to go through discovery and of course, Binance and their legal team has to go through it by a fine tooth comb and say, no, this wasn't what it was, this is what it is, and how'd you get this information? And this was, this is hearsay, legal speak and whatever else, but it is pretty damning when you have something like the CCO comes up and says this. It's quite amazing. So, not surprising though. And then there's some more stuff here, but it gets super boring and really the whole document is them just making the case of just how Binance is. They talk a lot about co-mingling funds in here. They talk about how there wasn't the right disclosures. I gotta tell you, the co-mingling of funds is not a great term to be used after FTX and some people have made the assumption that maybe this information that was begotten by the SEC was maybe from somebody who went and talked to Gary Gensler quite a bit and had numerous meetings with him and that person's name, unfortunately, is Sam Bakeman Freed. And I'm not saying that's what it is, that's what we have. So, moving forward in this document, it's just amazing to me just how in depth it goes as to everything. But what I wanted to show you is this. They named certain cryptos as securities. They named Solana and they gave you specific instances of why it actually is. They gave it Cardano, which was a pretty weak description of why they believe it's a security. They say information publicly disseminated by Cardano, including their sales of ADA have led ADA holders, including those who purchased ADA since number 2017 reasonably to view ADA as an investment in and expect to profit from the Cardano's donation to grow the Cardano platform, which in turn will increase demand for and value of ADA. And MATIC, Polygon, they have a ton of information. Not only they have what people have said, but they've taken things from the Twitter account from MSNBC interviews about how they were going to be the top three and on and so on and so forth. And just to go through it, this is what they name it. And I think most of you know this, but they're saying that Solana is a security, Cardano, Polygon, MATIC, Filecoin, Cosmos or Atom, Sandbox, Mana, essentially, Algorand, Axie, Infinity and Cody Network. To me, I look at this and I'm like, why do they just stop there? Why don't they just name everything as a security? Because that's what Gary has said numerous times. He says basically everything is a security. Why is it he's only cherry picking these every so often? Because I mean, not too long ago, they named a couple of other groups of cryptos, Algorand being one of them as a security. And now they're just adding on some more here. And it's just like every so many months or so, we get another description of what is a security and it screws up the market and so on and so forth. It's very interesting to me because of what Gary said at his MIT presentation. This was, believe, 2018, 2019. I don't want to say 2018. So just listen to what he says here because it is a drastic departure. We already know in the US and in many other jurisdictions that three quarters of the market are not ICOs or not what we could be called securities, even in the US, Canada and Taiwan, the three jurisdictions that follow something similar to the Howie test that we've talked about. Three quarters of the market is non-securities. It's just a commodity, a cash crypto. So you'll hear debates about initial coin offerings and what's a security and what's not a security relevant, relevant and important debate, but for three quarters of the market, it's not particularly relevant as a legal matter. I gotta tell you, interesting, and everybody's free to change their mind. That's okay, but it just is interesting how he's gone from one extreme to most of it's not to essentially everything is. It confounds me, I have no idea. So the market, of course, responded and this is just for posterity. We see that Bitcoin is down, everything's down across the board. Binance coin, BNB, took five of the biggest hit, 10% down in a day. Negative 9%, Solana, down 10%, and so on and so forth and so on and so forth. So that's their side and that's what they say it is. Again, not surprised. And to show the other part, here is SECs, or here's, excuse me, here's Binance's response to that. And they pretty much just say that it's unfounded. We're going to go to court and we're going to vigorously protest what has been said here. And it states, it says, look, it seems based on these developments that the SEC's goal here was never to protect investors. If that were the true of the case, the staff would have thoughtfully engaged with us on the facts and on our efforts to demonstrate the safety and security of the Binance US platform. The SEC's real intent here instead appears to make headlines. I gotta tell you, it's a good point. It's the same thing with Ripple and XRP. How many of our friends, people that we know, whether that be in real life or online, I got screwed by the SEC just by bringing in Ripple against the case where they could have potentially gone through discussions, talks, not brought this into court and settled this in another manner. They did it with EOS, worked out just fine, paid a nice little fine and off they went. Now here we are again, and they're like, you know what? We, the SEC, maybe we missed the Voyager, the Celsius, the FTX, maybe we missed that. Let's make up lost ground. Let's really go hard. That's okay. That's essentially what I thought was going to happen. And this is just the normalcy of what it is. But there's one thing that just confounds me and that is that this, we just saw that Bitcoin went down to 6.2% or whatever else it is. Gary has maintained, in the video we just watched at MIT, to what he is now, he has maintained that Bitcoin is a commodity. He said that very clearly. And he's talked about Ethereum, he's walked that back a little bit. Now that's one from proof of word to proof of stake. I understand, I suppose. But there's no reason why Bitcoin should go down. Was there a hack? Was there a double spend? Did somebody come out and say, hey, I'm Satoshi Nakamoto and I'm with the CIA or something? I don't think so. So to me, when I look at this, I'm like, this is kind of a rational response to what's happening. I get it, people are worried, but in all honesty, it was just bound to happen. And I'll get to that in a second. Alex, honestly, I think it's good. I'll say why, I bet. But I will say this. And I said this before, and I said this in February. I said this in May. You gotta sue the SEC. You gotta bind together or band together or else they're gonna pick you off one by one. That's what I said before. That's why I'm sticking to it and they're doing a damn good job. So Coinbase is already there. It'd be interesting if Coinbase and Binance come together, maybe Kraken, I don't know if they can do that after they've signed the document that doesn't allow them to go right after the SEC. But again, it's a great quote from Benjamin Franklin, whether they're hanging together or more so surely we will hang separately. And I'm not saying that Binance is in the clear and fantastic and didn't do anything dirty. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that if we want regulatory clarity, if we leave it up to Gary Gensler, I think we know where we're going. And there's only one way out and that is through. And that is through Gary Gensler and the SEC. So that's a problem, but that's okay because I believe that we just have to go through this. Which leads me to my last couple of points. I talked to Simon Dixon. If you don't know Simon Dixon, Bank of the Future, he's invested in small little companies like Coinbase and Kraken, Abra, Ethereum, bought Bitcoin at $3, create his own bank and stuff like that. So I had him on the show numerous times and we had talked and I asked him specifically again, you may have already seen this. I'm gonna play this clip. It's about two minutes. I asked him specifically, I'm like, who's lying? Because somebody's lying. It's either the exchanges who are lying to us and saying that we just can't get this done. The SEC's not doing it. Or it's the SEC who's lying to us. I learned to not jump to conclusions as much as possible. At least I try. So I asked him a specific question and since he's already gone through and worked with regulatory bodies to get compliance and they just got Ethereum staked. Ethereum staked as a security. Ethereum staking as a security, I should say. And I asked him, how hard was it and who's not telling the truth? So just listen to this. Yeah, well, both are true. So I think the SEC has made some really bad decisions. They let Celsius and FTX get the size that they are and people lost a lot of money. And at the same time, you can see the flip-flopping between make sure you apply and we went through some of those processes. So the broker dealer and ATS, which is how you do trading with securities without being a national exchange, we sold that to Coinbase and Coinbase acquired that and they've been trying to do security tokens through that, but we've spent, I mean, at Bank to the Future, we're actually now the longest standing company in Bitcoin and we're the world's first regulated securities business. We spent a decade trying to comply with all this shit and we had to rebuild it again and again, like three times as all these new rules and regulations come through. So, we just launched ETH staking as a security and it takes like a couple of years just to get all of those different parts together. So nobody is used to the user experience that you have to go through in order to do this compliantly and it's very disruptive to the business model that they may be used to if they were doing things as crypto. And so really, both are correct, but I do think that the SEC has had to, they've had a lot of criticism for good reasons and they have to start letting these people get regulated and I do all think they pick winners and losers and there's some politics going on with whatever happened with FTX. There was some politics going on with what happened with Coinbase and Ripple and all these things. And the US is certainly losing a chunk of this market in order to protect the incumbents because they don't want the rules to affect everyone going off their normal exchanges and then coming over here. And that is really what this is about. Imagine if you implement a little thing and then Google suddenly says, right, I'm delisting off NASDAQ, I'm creating a security token and we're going over here. It can be incredibly disruptive when you are the largest capital market in the world. And so you've got to get inside that. And plus this industry, we just fucked up to be frank. Sorry to swear. We embarrassed our industry. We do all sorts of scammy things. We made our, we're our own worst enemies. True. We did some things which are just unforgivable. They're going to lead to a lot of people saying you should have regulated, please regulate this stuff harder. I lost my life savings. That only comes back to more shit. But it's the natural evolution of innovation. And I think we come out at the end a better place. And thankfully there's competition amongst countries. You've got El Salvador that's coming out doing digital securities. You've got Europe doing virtual asset service provider regimes with all insider trading, all insider information, all of those things. And the US just needs to catch up with what the global regulators are saying everyone else needs to do. Exactly. I couldn't have said it better. Actually, I literally cannot say that better. Yeah, we're going to come out at a better place. And Simon, I believe, is right. Also, good news, me, Simon and Azad are going to be at the Coin Bureau event this Saturday as a matter of fact in London. So if you're in the area, stop by and check that out. But here's the thing, just like he talked about, he's like, yeah, we did it. We can do it. It is possible. People get all freaked out about this, about securities and commodities and currencies and da-da-da. We buy securities all day long in America. We do this all the time. They're called stocks. We do this on Robinhood. It's just that there's regulatory clarity. Like, yeah, okay, it's a stock of the security, got it. So for us, when we're doing these things, we're just like, okay, well, you know, I've said this for a long time. Just give us regulatory clarity of what it is. If Gary's not going to do it, well, Congress just put a new bill in place, Republicans, to give us clarity as to what is a security, a commodity as it pertains to digital assets. So I'm looking forward to that. But here's the last piece, which is this. It can be done. It's been done and there's already been approval for an exchange of broker dealer in the United States right now by FINRA on the SEC. And we covered this a couple of weeks ago. This is from May 23rd. And this is what it is. FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and Industry Funded Oversight Armcred by the SEC announced that it had approved its forced broker dealer. That's what Simon was just talking about, which, what they gave the Coinbase with custody rights for digital asset securities from Athea member, Capital LLC. That's the name of the company. FINRA also gave OTC Markets Group, same thing, and legally provide trading for crypto securities. Here's the website from Athea. And this is the first step. They're like, look, we got approval. It is for institutions right now. And again, fair and early markets, crypto indefinitely, a bridge from securities to cryptos, SEC and FINRA registered, bill for digital assets, blah, blah, individual investors join our wait list. So it's not like this is impossible. It has already been done. And for some reason, comment below, FINRA and SEC are picking winners. And I shouldn't say it like that. I should not say it like that. Not that they're picking winners, but they're picking the people. They're giving the documentation, the people that are going into register. Whether that be the winners or not the winners, I'm just letting everybody know it is possible. It's not impossible. Things are actually being done and moving. And we knew it was gonna suck, but in all honesty, did we not know that this whole year was gonna suck anyhow? It's 2023. If we look at the four year cycles, we knew it was gonna be awful. And 2024 is not gonna be that much greater until we hit a Bitcoin halving in April or May. I got time. So these to me are just things that have to be done. I'm looking forward. Anyhow, that's it for today. So look, a little bit long, sorry about that, but I just wanted to calm some people's nerves, just tell them to relax. It's gonna be all right. Not a big deal. We'll get through it. And that's it. Like today's video, thumbs up. Consider subscribing. Get your news from somebody. It doesn't have to be me. Just stay on top of things. And that's it.