Last Minute: Another Altcoin Intervention From SEC! Celebrity Founder Sued: Price Drops

According to the last minute information, Justin Sun, the founder of Tron (TRX) and the name behind Bittorrent (BTT), has been sued by the SEC.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Justin Sun on Wednesday over allegations of unregistered securities sales and airdropping, fraud and market manipulation.

SEC, TRX And of BTT claimed to be unregistered securities.

In a press release from the SEC, Sun said it has sued the Tron Foundation, BitTorrent Foundation, and BitTorrent (now known as Rainberry) for the sale of Tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT) tokens, which it describes as unregistered crypto-asset securities. The regulator also claimed that the defendants “manipulated in a fraudulent manner”.

The agency also sued Lindsay Lohan, Jake Paul, Soulja Boy, Lil Yachty, Ne-Yo, Akon, and Michele Mason on charges of illegal publicity for allegedly promoting TRX and BTT and failing to disclose that they were paid for it. Most of these celebrities admitted to the accusations.

Sun, who was appointed as Grenada’s ambassador to the World Trade Organization (WTO) last year, claimed the SEC had “traded more than 600,000 TRX wash trades between two crypto-asset trading platform accounts it controls” to TRX through the wash trading scheme. tried to artificially inflate the trading volume of

The agency said that between 4.5 million and 7.4 million TRX per day were traded through the defendants’ wash trading transactions.

The SEC said, “This plan required a substantial supply of TRX, which Sun allegedly provided. As alleged, Sun also sold TRX to the secondary market, generating $31 million from illegal, unregistered sales and offerings of the token.”

SEC Chairman Gary Gensler said in a statement that the lawsuit is an example of the potential risks crypto investors may face with unregistered securities:

“As alleged, Sun and its companies not only targeted US investors in their unregistered offerings and sales, generating millions of illegal revenues at the expense of investors, but also wash trading on an unregistered trading platform to create a misleading appearance of active trading on TRX. they coordinated.

Sun also encouraged investors to buy TRX and BTT by running a publicity campaign where he and his celebrity supporters concealed the fact that celebrities were being paid for their tweets.”

Wash trading is a fraudulent trading practice in which an investor buys and sells the same financial asset (such as stocks, cryptocurrencies or commodities) in order to produce an image of trading activity and manipulate the market. In wash trading, the investor is essentially trading with himself or an accomplice, with no real change in ownership of the asset.

*Not investment advice.