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David Zaslowsky

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The Texas Blockchain Council (TBC) describes itself as a nonprofit industry association that works to make the State of Texas the jurisdiction of choice for cryptocurrency, blockchain and digital asset innovation. Riot Platforms, Inc. is a TBC member and Bitcoin mining company. On February 22, 2024, the two sued the United States Department of Energy (“DOE”), the U.S. Energy Information Administration (“EIA”) and the Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”), among others, for what Plaintiffs…

On February 26, 2024, Republican Senator Ted Cruz, along with fellow Republican Senators Bill Hagerty, Rick Scott, Ted Budd and Mike Braun introduced the CBDC Anti-Surveillance State Act. The Federal Reserve acts as the U.S. central bank. The proposed legislation states that no Federal Reserve Bank may “issue a central bank digital currency or any digital asset that is substantially similar, under any other name or label, directly to an individual.’’ This same prohibition was…

We have been following for years (see here) the steps that the United States Internal Revenue Service has taken to sensitize taxpayers to the need for them to properly report sales of cryptocurrency. There did not, however, seem to be any criminal cases brought for failure to do so. That is why the federal indictment against Frank Ahlgren III that was made public earlier this month was interesting. Unlike prior cryptocurrency criminal tax cases, which…

One of the issues that we, and much of the rest of the crypto community, have been following for many years is the battle between the crypto industry and the SEC on the issue of whether crypto assets are securities. In November 2022, a federal district judge in New Hampshire held that the LBRY token was a security. On July 13, 2023, a federal district judge in the Southern District of New York ruled that Ripple Labs’…

CoinList Markets LLC is a currency exchange. When its customers open accounts, there is a Know-Your-Customer (KYC) process which requires individual applicants to provide, among other things, their country of residence and address. CoinList maintained several sanctions compliance measures, including screening new and existing customers against Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) and other sanctions lists. By spring of 2021, CoinList’s onboarding protocols also included an automated process through which an application was meant to…

We previously reported on the indictment of Shakeeb Ahmed. According to the charging documents and other filings and statements made in court, the facts were as follows: In July 2022, Ahmed carried out an attack on a cryptocurrency exchange, the Crypto Exchange, by exploiting a vulnerability in one of the Crypto Exchange’s smart contracts and inserting fake pricing data to fraudulently cause that smart contract to generate approximately $9 million dollars’ worth of inflated fees…

KuCoin is one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. In March of this year, the New York Attorney General (“AG”) sued KuCoin, accusing it of failing to register with the state before letting investors buy and sell cryptocurrencies on its platform. According to the AG, an investigator from the AG’s office was able to create an account with KuCoin using a computer with a New York-based IP address to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, including popular tokens…

SEC v. Crowd Machine, Inc. was a lawsuit that the United States Securities and Exchange Commission brought against Crowd Machine Inc. (“CMI”), and others, for CMI’s making materially false and misleading statements in connection with an initial coin offering of Crowd Machine Compute Tokens (CMCTs). Rather than using the ICO proceeds for the stated purpose, Defendants diverted more than $5.8 million in ICO proceeds to gold mining entities in South Africa. The SEC also alleged…

The New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) views itself as the leading cryptocurrency state regulator in the country. Its regulatory scheme began with its introduction of the BitLicense, a set of regulations that prohibited companies from engaging in “virtual currency business activity” in New York, or with New York residents, without a license. Very few were actually applied for, and fewer still issued. Much has been written about how this regulatory environment has stymied…

We have previously written about the SEC’s case against LBRY, which offered a video sharing application. Its native token, LBC, was meant to be used by content creators and audience members on LBRY’s “content marketplace,” which billed itself as an alternative to YouTube. LBRY had a real business and real customers. But the SEC sued LBRY, claiming that it had conducted an unregistered offering of digital asset securities. LBRY tried to fight back aggressively, noting that…