Coinbase, Do Kwon, Lindsay Lohan Are All Ensnared by Widening Crypto Dragnet

tech.hindustantimes.com:

 Last year's crypto-market meltdown triggered a series of bankruptcies that almost completely reshaped the digital-asset industry. This year, government watchdogs appear to be arriving on the scene to finish the job.

The past week saw the industry hit with another deluge of enforcement news, from the SEC's threat to take legal action against Coinbase Inc. and its suit against the Tron blockchain network to the apprehension of crypto fugitive Do Kwon. Even celebrity crypto promoters like actress Lindsay Lohan and rapper Soulja Boy got caught up in the crackdown. 

As the headlines piled up, the developments put a lid on a rally in Bitcoin that had been pushing the oldest token back up toward the closely watched $30,000 level. A glitch Friday morning at crypto exchange Binance took spot trading offline for more than two hours on a platform whose market dominance has only grown as other players have folded, adding to the sour mood. Bitcoin drifted around $27,500 on Saturday.

The collision course between the US government and crypto true believers' vision of a system where money can be freely exchanged around the world without “censorship” by authorities was accelerated by the failure of the Terra blockchain's stablecoin to maintain its $1 peg and the bankruptcy of FTX last year, which combined to vaporize almost $2 trillion of digital wealth. This month's implosion of crypto-friendly banks Silvergate Capital Corp. and Signature Bank has added fuel.

At the center of much of the recent actions is the SEC's decision to treat many cryptoassets as securities that must be registered with the agency and subject to all the regulations that go along with it. Needless to say, digital-asset aficionados were livid with much of the week's