The post Coinbase Scores Another Win Against ‘Arbitrary and Capricious’ SEC Order appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

A panel of federal appeals court judges in Philadelphia dealt another blow to the SEC’s crypto regime on Monday, emerging as the latest prominent court to question how the federal agency has navigated its regulation of digital assets.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled today in favor of Coinbase, which sued the SEC last year over the agency’s refusal to explicitly lay out its crypto policy. Instead of putting forth crypto-specific rules, the SEC has instead sporadically sued crypto firms over the last six-odd years in a pattern that has been disparagingly dubbed “regulation by enforcement.”  Today a three-judge panel, comprised of two Democrats and one Republican, ruled that the SEC’s dismissive response to Coinbase’s request for crypto-specific rulemaking was unacceptable.  “Because we believe the SEC’s order was conclusory and insufficiently reasoned, and thus arbitrary and capricious, we grant Coinbase’s petition in part and remand to the SEC for a more complete explanation,” today’s order reads.  The judges added that they declined, however, to force the SEC to create crypto-specific rules, as Coinbase had requested.  According to Judge Thomas Ambro, a Clinton-era Democrat who wrote Monday’s opinion, previous case law established that an agency like the SEC could only be forced to create rules against its will if an extreme delay in creating those rules “endangered human lives”—a requirement clearly not met by crypto-related regulations.  So the SEC doesn’t have to issue new crypto rules now, but it must explain to Coinbase in much greater detail why it has, thus far, refused to do so.  “Rather than force the agency to make a rule, we order it to explain its decision not to,” Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Republican appointed to the court by Donald Trump, wrote Monday in a concurring opinion. “Indeed, a rule may not…

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Filed under: News - @ January 14, 2025 5:23 pm