SEC denies Coinbase’s petition for rulemaking

The original petition was filed in July 2022

article-image

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong | Source: TechCrunch "775208327GB00107_TechCrunch" (CC license)

share

The US Securities and Exchange Commission denied Coinbase’s 2022 petition for rulemaking on Friday.

The SEC opposes the petition’s view that using existing securities laws to enforce crypto regulation is “unworkable.”

“The Commission has discretion to determine the timing and priorities of its regulatory agenda, including with respect to discretionary rulemaking such as that requested in the Petition,” the SEC wrote.

Gary Gensler, Chair of the Commission, said that he agrees with the Commission’s denial.

“I disagree with the petition’s assertion that now is the right time for the regulatory action it suggests. The Commission and its staff are currently pursuing numerous undertakings applicable to crypto asset securities and intermediaries, and the Commission’s assessment of whether and, if so, how to alter the existing regulatory regime may be informed by the results of these initiatives,” Gensler said in a statement

The current laws, he added, “appropriately governs crypto asset securities.”

In the end, the SEC said that Coinbase’s petition for rulemaking was “unwarranted,” which led to the denial.

Coinbase filed the request for rulemaking back in July 2022, claiming that “rules for securities just do not work for digital assets.”

“That hurdle is the fact that the securities rules simply do not work for digitally native instruments. They don’t work for tokenized debt. They don’t work for tokenized equity. They don’t work for crypto,” Coinbase’s chief policy officer Faryar Shirzad wrote in a blog post at the time.

The petition was filed a little less than a year before the SEC filed a lawsuit against the crypto exchange, alleging that it operated as an unregistered exchange while selling and offering unregistered securities. The two are still engaged in a legal battle. 

In April of this year, Coinbase sued the SEC to demand regulatory clarity on crypto. The SEC then denied answering Coinbase twice.  

Coinbase did not immediately return a request for comment.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Upcoming Events

Brooklyn, NY

SUN - MON, JUN. 22 - 23, 2025

Blockworks and Cracked Labs are teaming up for the third installment of the Permissionless Hackathon, happening June 22–23, 2025 in Brooklyn, NY. This is a 36-hour IRL builder sprint where developers, designers, and creatives ship real projects solving real problems across […]

Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

recent research

morpho 2 graphic.png

Research

Utilizing a ‘DeFi Mullet’ approach, Coinbase’s Bitcoin-backed loans integration with Morpho demonstrates a powerful blueprint for CEXs to monetize dormant assets by expanding adoption of wrapped products (cbBTC, USDC) while also supporting native and/or preferred DeFi ecosystems (Base) which can further lead to downstream growth in onchain liquidity and increased utilization of the related assets.

article-image

The fate of Coinbase has been intertwined with Bitcoin long before the company went public in 2021

article-image

Forward Guidance’s Felix Jauvin noted that he’s bullish on both crypto and bitcoin on a “mean reversion basis”

article-image

This is the largest equity investment that Framework Ventures has ever made,” Framework’s Michael Anderson exclusively told Blockworks

article-image

The stickiness could be the result of bear market conditions where users are swapping out of riskier tokens to hold stablecoins on Solana apps instead, a Blockworks Research analyst said

article-image

The dollar index is down 3.7% today from Wednesday, and consumer sentiment fell to lower than expected

article-image

Ethereum core developers finalize Pectra’s May 7 launch and wrap scoping of the next upgrade