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The SEC’s lawsuit against Binance has been ongoing since June when the regulator served a lawsuit to Coinbase as well.
The proceedings have had their ups and downs. Since then, the main Binance exchange has settled with the SEC when Binance Holdings Ltd was asked to pay fines adding up to $4.3 billion, and former CEO Changpeng Zhao was forced to step down. CZ is currently out on bond – although he is obligated to remain in the US – until his sentencing.
Allegations of Obscurantism
However, Binance.US, legally known as BAM Trading Services, is still grappling with the SEC in court. After previous requests for intervention, the Washington D.C. court, in which the case is being judged, directed the two parties to work together on the discovery process. In a joint report submitted yesterday, the SEC alleges that the two sides have met an impasse.
According to the watchdog, Binance.US relented in its objections to providing agency representatives with an inspection of its in-house software. However, the SEC claims that the tour was scripted and did not provide any real insights into their inner workings.
“Despite multiple meet and confers concerning its scope and process, BAM refused to conduct anything more than an unrecorded, mostly choreographed tour of certain relevant software and infrastructure relevant to its Customer Assets. BAM’s counsel also refused the SEC’s requests to review different components of BAM’s software and then refused to answer several questions SEC counsel raised during the inspection.”
The SEC continues by stating that it now doubts that BAM holds exclusive access to private keys.
“BAM witnesses have testified that BHL established and still retains custody of the private keys to these wallets in an Amazon Web Services environment that hosts BHL’s servers and wallet software for BAM’s wallets and that BAM had no access to the AWS environment, servers, or software.”
However, the SEC admitted that BAM had indeed remained cooperative overall, supplementing its answers whenever necessary.
Binance.US Denies Allegations
When grilled on the subject, representatives of Binance.US stated that they had provided answers to all of the SEC’s requests, even when they had been “exceptionally broad.”
According to BAM’s legal team, they had already gone above and beyond their obligations as an institution and had simply declined to offer information on trade secrets that in no way affected the ownership of customer assets.
The information provided by Binance.US allegedly includes thousands of pages of documents, monthly reports, declarations under oath, and inspections of custody devices.
BAM therefore requests an end to the discovery process, which would allow the court to proceed with a decision regarding BAM’s affairs eventually.
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