US Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Atkins is a keynote speaker at the Digital Chamber’s DC Blockchain Summit next month, and the event’s main sponsor – Unicoin – is in a legal battle with the agency, claiming the SEC’s chairman is being misled into perpetuating a legacy war against crypto.
The CEO of Unicoin, the summit’s “platinum” sponsor, says his company is not allowed to speak with SEC executives because of the agency’s ongoing legal action against the crypto platform. Last May, the SEC sued the company and its executives, including CEO Alexander Konanykhin, accusing them of raising $100 million for tokens that were not backed by real estate in the way the firm represented.
Konanykhin said the legal battle is being pursued by rogue state enforcers (“minions” of former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler) who have misled current SEC Chairman Paul Atkins. (The case may have begun during Gensler’s tenure, but the resulting lawsuit was filed last year under then-acting chairman Mark Uyeda.)
“We are prohibited from talking to Atkins or other commissioners, so they have no way of knowing they have been defrauded by ‘dirty cops,’ holdovers from Gensler’s War on Crypto,” Konanykhin wrote in a message to CoinDesk.
Unicoin executives may not be able to speak with Atkins, but the company is helping pay for the event, with Atkins and Commissioner Hester Peirce the first two speakers featured on the summit’s website, on a list that also includes Konanykhin.
When asked about the confluence of Unicoin and its agency opponent at the upcoming summit, organizers responded with a statement saying, “Companies come to the Digital Chamber DC Summit because it’s an opportunity to educate and build bridges.”
A spokesman for the SEC declined to comment on the situation.
Konanykhin’s company has further sought to educate the SEC with a campaign involving trucks circling downtown Washington and past the agency, decorated with pointed messages that included the sentiment, “The War on Crypto is NOT over.”
The CEO has threaded a needle in his scathing criticism of the SEC. He praised Atkins for “pushing to repair the damage to the crypto industry inflicted by his predecessor,” but insisted that the agency’s enforcement staff is sabotaging Atkins by maintaining Gensler’s legal battle with the digital asset sector, despite the fact that the SEC dismissed or delayed the other major crypto cases Gensler pursued.
Also, the current securities fraud charges against Unicoin were brought last year, with Republican Commissioner Uyeda as the stand-in chairman. The lawsuit was approved by a commission that then included two Republicans and one Democrat, with no dissenting opinions issued. But Konanykhin says the enforcement attorneys rubber-stamped the approval, arguing that “rejecting a staff recommendation is the exception rather than the rule.”
The political summit, among the most prominent annual crypto events in Washington, includes a code of conduct that calls for “a safe and welcoming environment that promotes open dialogue and the free expression of ideas.” While Konanykhin may want to tell Atkins that his enforcement staff “grossly fabricated absurd charges against Unicoin and its leaders,” the legal restrictions against him will not allow for that open dialogue.
