Those familiar with the career of Elon Musk and his use of tongue-in-cheek conventions (such as tweeting about taking Tesla private at $420 a share), were probably not surprised, based on the many reports of actions he took relating to Dogecoin, that the new government commission he has been tasked with co-leading has the acronym DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency). And, within days of the report of the creation of DOGE, the plaintiffs who brought…
In re Celsius Network LLC, Case No. 22-10964 (MG) (Bankr. S.D.N.Y. Oct. 24, 2024), was a case in bankruptcy court in New York in which the litigation administrator for the post-effective date debtors in the well-publicized bankruptcy of the Celsius cryptocurrency platform brought suit attempting to avoid allegedly fraudulent transfers and recover property of the bankruptcy estate. These particular transfers were made to digital wallets and cryptocurrency exchange accounts of defendants who were anonymous. Neither…
Coinme Inc. describes itself as a company that started with a handful of Bitcoin ATMs but now has thousands, which is just one of the means by which it offers the public access to cryptocurrencies. In an Order dated October 25, 2024 and made public on November 4. 2024, Connecticut’s Banking Commissioner (the “Commissioner”) suspended Coinme’s ability to transfer money in Connecticut. Connecticut participated in a multistate examination of Coinme in 2023, along with Colorado,…
On January 10, 2024, after 10 years of saying “no,” the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved the application for eleven spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Within four months, Bitcoin hit record highs and more than $30 billion was invested in the Bitcoin ETFs. Then, on May 23, 2024, the SEC surprised the crypto community when it effectively approved the sale of spot Ether ETFs (see here). Those ETFs started trading in late July…
In 2021, we reported that the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire dismissed a lawsuit that sought to block the United States Internal Revenue Service’s effort to obtain records from cryptocurrency exchanges that included account information about individual accounts. In a decision on September 24, 2024, the First Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that dismissal. The case concerned a 2019 episode in which the IRS sent about 10,000 letters to taxpayers…
We previously reported on the pre-emptive lawsuit that Consensys Software Inc., a software developer whose business centers on the Ethereum blockchain network, brought against the United States Securities and Exchange Commission in April 2024 in federal court in Texas. The Complaint may be found here. Three of the four counts in the Complaint relate to Consensys’s ETH transactions (ETH is the native token for the Ethereum blockchain). The fourth count relates to Consensys’s two MetaMask software products:…
We recently reported about the decision by DraftKings to discontinue its NFT Marketplace business. At the time, DraftKings said the decision was due to “recent legal considerations.” Although DraftKings did not elaborate, conventional wisdom was that this was a reference to a decision in July, in federal district court in Massachusetts in Dufoe v. DraftKings, that refused to dismiss a proposed class action suit against DraftKings claiming that the NFTs that DraftKings sold on its…
On August 16, 2024, a federal district court judge in Florida denied in large part the motion to dismiss brought by basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal in the case in which he was sued for his role in Astrals Project, concerning NFTs. An NFT (non-fungible token) can be thought of as a unique cryptographic key contained within a digital token on the blockchain that verifies the corresponding content file as genuine. It is most often used…
In an Announcement on July 30, 2024, DraftKings said that it had decided to discontinue its NFT Marketplace. DraftKings explained that its decision was not made lightly but was due to “recent legal considerations.” Although DraftKings did not elaborate any further on those considerations, last month, a judge in federal district court in Massachusetts refused to dismiss a proposed class action suit against DraftKings claiming that the NFTs that DraftKings sold on its Marketplace were…
We recently reported about the pre-emptive lawsuit that Consensys Software Inc., brought against the United States Securities and Exchange Commission over the regulation of Ethereum. We also previously reported on the SEC’s first NFT enforcement action, against Impact Theory, LLC, a media and entertainment company. The SEC’s second NFT enforcement action, against Stoner Cats, was brought a few weeks later, in September 2023. These two actions by the SEC were a big part of the impetus behind…