Many securities lawsuits against crypto companies in the United States will likely “quietly go away” once Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler steps down in January, according to crypto asset manager Pantera.
“I think what we’re going to see is some settlements,” said Pantera’s chief legal officer, Katrina Paglia, during a Nov. 21 panel at the North American Blockchain Summit in Dallas, Texas.
Paglia said that the SEC “could actually just go in and file motions to dismiss and withdraw all of their claims,” but added: “I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think that’s just too far of a stretch.”
More likely, there will be “some neither admit nor deny type language” from some of these claims, she said.
“They’re going to quietly go away. The defendants will pay something.”
Paglia added that the regulator will get to “make some level of a statement” and get something for the value of the time and energy that the government has spent looking into these things, which would be “very beneficial.”
The securities regulator announced on Nov. 21 that Gary Gensler would be stepping down as SEC chair on January 20th.
Paglia was also confident that some of the Wells notices — threats of legal action from the SEC — may also “just quietly go away,” and the regulator will stop spending resources investigating some organizations.
“I think we’re hopeful that we’ll start to see some no-action letters come out of the SEC,” she added. A no-action letter is a written response from the agency indicating that it will not recommend legal action against an entity if it proceeds with a proposed course of action.
She also said that there was a rumor that SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce will take over crypto matters within the agency until a permanent chair is seated, “and we’re going to see her recommend some no-action letters.”
She concluded that this may happen soon, “So we’re looking forward to a January or February kind of chill on a lot of the litigation that exists today.”
In its war on crypto, the SEC under Gary Gensler has taken legal actions against a raft of high-profile crypto companies, including Ripple, Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Uniswap, OpenSea, Consensys, Crypto.com and Robinhood.
