The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is reportedly investigating whether Binance’s BNB token was a security at the time of its sale in 2017.
Bloomberg reported Monday that the SEC has launched a probe into the BNB token. The US securities regulator is taking a look at the early days of the exchange, examining whether the sale of its BNB token during a 2017 initial coin offering amounted to an unregistered sale of securities.
SEC chair Gary Gensler has been vocal in his concern that platforms may be hosting tokens that could be classified as securities, but his comments have focused more on taking exchanges to task for hosting unregistered securities than going after projects themselves, as previous SEC regimes did during the ICO boom.
Binance has faced scrutiny from a variety of US regulators in recent months.
The SEC is also reportedly investigating the exchange’s US arm, Binance.US, to ensure it’s appropriately differentiated from its global counterpart. The Internal Revenue Service and Department of Justice are also taking a closer look at Binance to gain insight into its business, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has also reportedly launched an inquiry into whether Binance allowed US residents to trade on its platform.
