The Roundup: Ripple, Grayscale, and Uniswap — SEC losses stack up

In this week’s Roundup newsletter we discuss SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s growing list if courtroom setbacks.
Having already partially lost against Ripple this summer, the regulator was hit with fresh disappointments this week when Grayscale and Uniswap won their cases.
Elsewhere, we look at Solana’s post-FTX recovery, Elon Musk’s latest payments push, and the supply of Dai.

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Happy Friday!

Adam Morgan here with a digest of the week’s most important crypto stories.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission has racked up courtroom losses up and down the Eastern seaboard. Two significant setbacks this week could force the regulator to rethink its approach.

On Tuesday, the SEC’s rejection of Grayscale’s proposal to convert its flagship Bitcoin trust into a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund was unanimously overturned. The loss could pave the way for a spot Bitcoin ETF in the US.

“The denial of Grayscale’s proposal was arbitrary and capricious because the Commission failed to explain its different treatment of similar products,” Judge Neomi Rao wrote in the decision.

Up the road in New York, Judge Katherine Polk Failla of the US District Court in Manhattan dealt the regulator another blow on Tuesday.

She dismissed a lawsuit brought by Nessa Risley on behalf of other investors, in which Risley claimed she’d suffered “substantial losses” after buying tokens on Uniswap, which is a decentralised crypto exchange.

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Judge Failla rejected the contention that Uniswap was a securities exchange and could be held accountable.

Another setback for Gary Gensler, and the latest since Ripple partially won its case against the regulator in July. The chair of the SEC has long argued cryptocurrencies should be regulated like stocks and bonds.

That’s all for this week, have a great weekend,

Adam Morgan McCarthy

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Solana is enjoying a "renaissance" several months after the collapse of FTX had outside observers wondering whether it would survive. (Rita Fortunato/Rita Fortunato)

Solana enjoys post-FTX ‘renaissance’ on back of network and DeFi upgrades

Crypto in the Solana ecosystem plummeted after the collapse of FTX. The blockchain has defied sceptics in the months since, and has largely recovered. Developers working on Solana say they’re in the midst of a “renaissance.”

Portrait of Rune Christensen over a background of a blurred circuit board with superimposed Dai stablecoins. — Dai hits $5b market cap, bucks stablecoin downtrend after 20% supply surge (Rita Fortunato/Rita Fortunato)

High yields split MakerDAO community as Dai supply surges 25%

MakerDAO raised the yield for Dai to 8% this month, before bringing it back to 5%, in an effort to create sustainable growth and capital inflows. Some DAO members say the strategy is unsustainable and attracted whales to “bleed the coffers” of the community.

Elon Musk Changes Twitter Name And Logo To X - 27 Jul 2023 Mandatory Credit: Photo by David Talukdar/Shutterstock (14024596b) In this photo illustration a person browsing Elon musk X account, formerly Twitter, on an iPhone, on 27 July 2023 in Guwahati, India Elon Musk Changes Twitter Name And Logo To X - 27 Jul 2023 (David Talukdar/Shutterstock/David Talukdar/Shutterstock)

Elon Musk scoops up licenses for crypto payments — but experts say don’t hold your breath

X, formerly Twitter, has secured its seventh US state payment licence under Twitter Payments LLC. Elon Musk is reportedly looking to square shoulders with payment giants like PayPal. But it will be some time before these licences can result in any crypto payment service.