
The SEC said Wednesday it has charged a handful of celebrities - including the internet provocateur-turned-professional boxer Jake Paul and actress Lindsay Lohan - with promoting cryptocurrencies without disclosing that they were compensated for doing so. Then, you can add a curated selection of our best stories to your inbox every weekend. The SEC said that among eight celebrities, Paul, Lohan, the former teen heartthrob Austin Mahone and the rapper Soulja Boy, illegally promoted cryptocurrencies Tronix and BitTorrent.
In March 2021, she presented an auction in TRX for an NFT, or non-fungible token, of one of her songs. On April 1, 2021, she e-mailed a list of people who had voted for her on Election Day.
Paul and Lohan - along with rapper Lil Yachty - were among the six celebrities who agreed to pay more than $400,000 to settle the charges, which were not named in the complaint, as Mahone and Soulja Boy were.
Reps for Lohan, Paul, Mahone, Soulja Boy and Lil Yachty did not respond to requests for comment. Tron and BitTorrent, which the SEC said are completely owned by Sun, and the foreign ministry of Grenada, which appointed Sun as ambassador to the World Trade Organization in 2021, did not respond to requests for comment.
The scandal was not the first action by the SEC against celebrities it alleged had illegally promoted cryptocurrencies. Last year, Kim Kardashian agreed to pay $1.26 million for settlement of SEC charges that she promoted EthereumMax on social media.
The SEC issued a legal notice to Coinbase on Wednesday, according to the cryptocurrency platform. The SEC said in a statement that it has received a notification from Coinbase that they have identified potential securities violations, but little more. We asked the SEC specific to identify which assets on our platforms they believe may be securities and they declined to do so, said Paul Grewal, Coinbase's chief legal officer. The SEC declined to comment on the request.
If the charges were brought, they would be the most significant regulatory action against Coinbase, which has positioned itself as a sort of responsible adult in the room as other crypto platforms - namely FTX - have collapsed.