Riding The Wave News Summary 172
U.S. Senator Lummis, Crypto Lobbyists Urge Court to Dismiss SEC's Coinbase Lawsuit, Visa Tests Way to Make Paying Ethereum Gas Fees Easier, & more.
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U.S. Senator Lummis, Crypto Lobbyists Urge Court to Dismiss SEC's Coinbase Lawsuit
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried jailed after judge revokes bail in crypto fraud case
Bitcoin has bottomed despite ‘astonishing’ BTC price action — Analyst
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U.S. Senator Lummis, Crypto Lobbyists Urge Court to Dismiss SEC's Coinbase Lawsuit
U.S. Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-Wy.), a number of crypto lobbying organizations and a group of professors called on a federal court to dismiss a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit against crypto exchange Coinbase Friday.
Filing amicus – or friend of the court – briefs, the organizations and lawmaker alleged the SEC was trying to exceed its authority in bringing a lawsuit alleging crypto trading platforms like Coinbase are simultaneously unregistered securities exchanges, brokers and clearinghouses trading similarly unregistered securities in the form of crypto assets. The SEC brought lawsuits against Coinbase and fellow exchange Binance (and the latter's U.S. arm, Binance.US) in June this year.
The amicus briefs, addressed to Judge Katherine Polk Failla, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, echo Coinbase’s own arguments in its motion for judgment dismissing the case.
In total, lobby organizations including the Blockchain Association, Crypto Council for Innovation, Chamber of Digital Commerce, DeFi Education Fund, Chamber of Progress, Consumer Technology Association, venture firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm and half a dozen academics filed a total of six briefs, not including the Senator’s.
Almost all of the briefs cited the recent Supreme Court case West Virginia vs. the Environment Protection Agency, which held that regulatory agencies couldn’t broadly exceed their mandate without Congressional approval.
The argument was recently rejected by another federal judge in the same court overseeing a different SEC case against a crypto platform. Judge Jed Rakoff, rejecting a motion to dismiss by Terraform Labs, wrote that the crypto industry isn't yet of a sufficient significance as to meet those Supreme Court precedents.
Visa Tests Way to Make Paying Ethereum Gas Fees Easier
Paying fees for transactions on the Ethereum blockchain is too complicated for most people.
That's the belief of credit-card giant Visa (V). It has completed testing a new way to allow users to pay the fees, known as "gas fees," in fiat currency with their credit card, the company wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
“When comparing the complex nature of blockchain transactions with the simplicity of fiat-based payment transactions supported by the Visa network, it becomes evident that improvement is needed,” Visa said.
To bridge the gap, Visa suggests leveraging Ethereum’s ERC-4337, the current standard that enables smart contracts on the blockchain to serve as wallets via a process called "account abstraction," and a paymaster contract — a smart-contract account that can sponsor gas fees on behalf of the user. The service would allow users to use a Visa card to pay directly for gas fees.
Visa said merchants or decentralized applications could run their paymaster system or use an existing wallet to make transactions easier. The paymaster service providers could also offer a choice of card-based gas fee payment, among other options.
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried jailed after judge revokes bail in crypto fraud case
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