Coinbase’s executives are standing up for its crypto staking services, claiming they cannot be classified as a security and threatening to bring the matter to the courts in the United States.
CEO Brian Armstrong posted on Twitter that the company will defend this in court if needed. The move follows the agreement reached by crypto exchange Kraken with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Feb. 10 to stop offering staking services or programs to clients in the country.
According to the SEC, Kraken failed to register the offer and sale of their crypto asset staking-as-a-service program, which the commission now qualified as securities. Aside from the service’s halt, Kraken agreed to pay $30 million in disgorgement, prejudgment interest and civil penalties.
Coinbase’s chief legal officer, Paul Grewal, weighed in on the issue in a blog post, claiming that staking is not a security under the US Securities Act, nor under the Howey test.
Grewal argues that staking fails to meet the four elements of the Howey test: investment of money, common enterprise, reasonable expectation of profits and the efforts of others. “The Howey test comes from a 1946 Supreme Court case – and there is a separate discussion to be had about whether that test makes sense for modern assets like crypto.
The SEC decision on crypto staking sparked criticism. In a statement titled “Kraken Down,” Commissioner Hester Peirce publicly rebuked her own agency over the shutdown of Kraken’s staking service. Peirce argued that regulation by enforcement “is not an efficient or fair way of regulating” an emerging industry.
