> Sued by who? The SEC? Who have told them that they intend to bring a legal action?

Yes! They initially reviewed CB's S-1, determined the model + products are legal, and allowed them to become a public company. CB's model hasn't changed since then, but now it's supposedly illegal without any change in legislation?

Good regulation happens in dialogue, like when CFDs and warrants were banned for retail. I don't think that's too much to ask for.

> Yes! They initially reviewed CB's S-1, determined the model + products are legal, and allowed them to become a public company. CB's model hasn't changed since then, but now it's supposedly illegal without any change in legislation?

That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works

Have you read the S1? It's a prospectus which details the general business model and strategy for Coinbase the company, to provide context around the registration of Coinbase stock as securities. It talks a lot about Bitcoin and Ethereum in general, but what it doesn't do is provide a list of every single product that Coinbase might sell at some point in the future for the SEC to vet and declare "legal". Selling unregistered securities is illegal regardless of whether you're a public company or not, I'm really not sure how this weird fixation on Coinbase's IPO filings is relevant.

In any case, if I set up as a pharmaceutical company, go public etc. and then suddenly start selling heroin to the general public, you can't ding the DEA/FDA/whoever for "allowing me to become a public company".

Looking on the Coinbase website, they currently offer 257 "tradable" assets. If the SEC thinks any one of these is a security, and they've not been registered (show me the S1 for, I don't know, "IoTex"), then they're going to bring an action.

> Good regulation happens in dialogue, like when CFDs and warrants were banned for retail. I don't think that's too much to ask for.

I've a lot of sympathy with this view, but the regulators are inherently a political organisation and you play the government you're dealt. If the SEC isn't interested in a dialogue (and they're not legally obliged to be), then you do the thing and wait to get sued. Or don't do the thing!

It may be useful to think of an example of a pharmaceutical company. For a pharma company that wants to go public, SEC checks to see whether they're cooking their books or lying to their investors in any form. It's FDA's job to make sure the drug they're selling doesn't make people's heads fall off.

Similarly, I would assume there are multiple teams within SEC, some for basic public disclosure/due diligence checking, and others for crypto regulations and enforcement. Just because one of the teams took longer to take action doesn't mean their entire lawsuit is invalid now.