Major crypto companies are accused in 11 lawsuits filed by Roche F.

Most of the major crypto companies were indicted in 11 lawsuits filed Friday in New York’s Federal Court. The law firm Roche Freedman claims that they sold a number of tokens that were unregistered securities. Nominated companies include Binance, Civic, BProtocol, Status, Block.one, KayDex, Quantstamp, BiBox, TRON Foundation, KuCoin and HDR Global Trading, the company behind the BitMEX platform. The directors of companies such as Brendan Blumer, Dan Larimer, Vinny Lingham, Changpeng Zhao and Arthur Hayes were also nominated.

Claimants represented by Roche Freedman are Chase Williams, Alexander Clifford and Eric Lee.

The lawsuits accuse violations of federal securities laws by token issuers and crypto exchanges that they have sold to persons residing in the United States.

Specific charges for each of the major crypto companies

The American law states that the directors of the companies are responsible for the activity of the companies they run. Overall, the allegations are that exchange platforms have sold unregistered securities through companies that are not authorized as broker-dealer.

In the 11 processes different charges are mentioned, depending on the activity of each company.

For example, the charges against KuCoin refer to ten tokens that the platform has sold since September 2017, without registering as a broker-dealer. These are EOS, SNT, QSP, KNC, TRX, LEND, ELF, CVC and TOMO.

If the court finds that any of these were actually securities and were sold without registration by KuCoin, the platform could be required to pay significant damages and could suffer consequences from the US authorities.

Very complex processes

There are several issues to consider when it comes to these processes. First, a total of 42 companies and individuals are nominated, most from jurisdictions other than the USA. Many of the named exchange platforms do not officially allow US citizens to trade.

A second aspect is that the basis of the charges requires the court to rule on the status of tokens as securities. To date, there have been very few cases where this status could be proved.

The law firm Roche Freedman has previous experience in cryptocurrencies. They were involved in the October 2019 trial in which Bitfinex was accused of market manipulation. The same firm also represents Kleiman’s heirs in its $ 1 billion lawsuit against Craig Wright.

In addition, the New York court has already ruled in a preliminary order that Telegram GRAM tokens are securities that should have been registered.

Overall, the wave of lawsuits against crypto companies has the potential to extend for very long periods of time. It remains to be seen what effects the ecosystem will have on the whole.