A US judge rules that SEC charges against Binance, Binance.US, and CZ for violating federal securities laws can proceed, but dismisses secondary sales charges
A federal judge ruled the SEC had plausibly alleged Binance, Binance.US and Changpeng Zhao violated federal securities laws.
Context & Ripple Effects
Binance and Changpeng Zhao had previously sought to dismiss the SEC suit; the court’s ruling keeps the central dispute alive while removing the secondary-sales portion of the case. It follows a period in which Binance and Zhao also resolved separate matters through a $4.3 billion DOJ settlement and a CFTC-approved settlement.
First-order effects
- The SEC’s core securities-law claims against Binance, Binance.US, and Zhao move into the next phase of litigation, while the dismissed secondary-sales claims no longer shape the case.
- Binance and the SEC must litigate a narrower complaint rather than the full set of allegations challenged in Binance’s earlier motion to dismiss.
Second-order effects
- The mixed ruling gives both sides a clearer litigation baseline: the SEC retains its principal case, but the dismissal limits one avenue of liability.
- Other US crypto-platform cases gain another court-tested reference point alongside the ruling that allowed the SEC’s main Coinbase case to continue while dismissing one claim.
Third-order effects
- If courts continue to allow core SEC claims against major platforms to proceed while pruning particular theories, US crypto regulation may be shaped incrementally through narrower, fact-specific rulings rather than a single all-encompassing precedent.
- The overlap of SEC litigation with separate DOJ and CFTC resolutions raises the compliance cost of operating across US regulatory regimes, though the ultimate securities-law boundaries remain unresolved.
The trend: US crypto oversight is increasingly being defined through parallel enforcement tracks and court rulings that separate viable platform-liability theories from weaker ones.