Popular digital currency exchange FTX and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried are the subjects of a new investigation occurring in Texas. The state alleges that the company may have sold unregistered securities to dozens of customers.
FTX Has Fallen into Texas’ Line of Vision
This is an ongoing scheme in the cryptocurrency world. Many financial organizations like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are coming down hard on crypto firms that may not have taken the time to properly register the tokens they were issuing either through exchanges for trading or through initial coin offerings (ICOs). Thus, penalties and the revocation of licenses are at hand should the SEC get its way with some of these enterprises, and now it looks like FTX has been added to that list.
Only this time, the SEC is not the organization pulling the strings. The group behind the wheel is the Texas State Securities Board, which claims that many of the tokens dispersed through FTX’s yield-bearing crypto savings accounts were provided through illegal means. Members of the group say that FTX failed to move through the proper channels and did not properly register the tokens being offered with the state.
News came about through a separate investigation that Texas is conducting of Voyager Digital, a crypto firm that filed bankruptcy just a few months ago. Sam Bankman-Fried was also named as a major culprit in the potential wrongdoing.
Joe Rotunda – head of the state securities board – is the man who drafted the present filing. He says that the investigation was not prompted through customer complaints. Rather, in simply looking at the dealings of Voyager Digital, he and his team noticed that FTX was simply offering interest-bearing products and that the company had not registered them with the state. He found it was very easy to take part in the program, which raised a lot of red flags for him and others working through the board.
He commented in a recent interview:
We want to make sure that everyone who invests their money has full disclosure of all the important information and the investor protection mechanisms are in place.
While FTX is not commenting on the present situation, a spokesperson for the enterprise did mention:
We have an active application for a license which has been pending, and [we] believe we are operating fully within the bounds of what we can do in the interim.
We’ll Work with You!
In the meantime, Rotunda commented further that his agency is willing to work with FTX to help bring it into compliance, stating:
We want Texans to have the opportunity to invest in what they want to invest in. We want to make sure they’re protected, and that’s why we’re trying to get companies into compliance. The entire goal is to protect Texas.
