Brian Armstrong, Coinbase CEO, reveals what's happening with the SEC

1/ There’s been some really shady stuff coming from the SEC lately. Here’s the scoop... 2/ For the past few years, tons of crypto investors have been making money off their assets. It’s pretty logical if you lend your funds, you can get some returns. Everyone seemed cool with it. 3/ A lot of solid crypto companies have been doing this for a while. Recently, Coinbase announced we’d be launching our own lending feature. 4/ We were getting ready to go live in a few weeks, so we decided to give the SEC a friendly heads up and brief them on what we’re doing. 5/ Their response was that this lending feature is considered a security. Seems odd to me, how can lending be a security? We asked the SEC to clarify their stance. We always try to work openly with regulators and keep things friendly. 6/ They wouldn’t explain why they consider it a security and instead hit us with a subpoena for a bunch of documents (which we provided), demanded our employees to testify (which we did), and then threatened to sue us if we went ahead with the launch, without giving us any reason. 7/ Look, we’re all for doing things by the book. Sometimes the law isn’t crystal clear. If the SEC wants to put out guidance, we’re totally on board with that (just make sure it’s enforced evenly across the board, that’d be nice). 8/ But in this situation, they're not giving any written opinion to the industry about what's acceptable and why. Instead, they’re just using intimidation tactics behind the scenes. Whatever their reasoning is, it seems like they’re just trying to assert control over other regulators.