Crypto-giant Binance is devoting a huge amount of money to a lawsuit with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), said the creator of YouTube channel Bitboy Crypto, citing the company’s lawyer.
“I spoke to a lawyer for Binance: they’ve allocated $1 billion to fight the SEC. In fact, the exchange could have hired all the big law firms at once to fight over the company,” Ben Armstrong wrote on Twitter.
By comparison, Ripple spent just $150 million fighting the same U.S. regulator in the courts, the cryptocurrency Influencer added.
Earlier, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao, and a similar lawsuit was later filed against exchange Coinbase. The SEC then demanded a freeze on the assets of Binance.US. Soon the U.S. division of Binance announced the imminent shutdown of deposits in U.S. dollars at the will of banking partners;
Meanwhile, Binance lawyers provided information that SEC Chairman Gary Gensler had offered himself as an advisor to the cryptocurrency exchange in 2019. Gensler was appointed head of the SEC in 2021 by President Joe Biden, and in 2023 the official came down hard on the crypto industry, suing numerous companies for allegedly selling unregistered securities.