U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Atkins will be a keynote speaker at the Digital Chamber’s DC Blockchain Summit next month, and the event’s primary sponsor, Unicoin, is engaged in a legal battle with the agency, claiming the SEC chairman was misled into perpetuating a legacy war on crypto.
The chief executive of Unicoin, which is the summit’s “platinum” sponsor, said his company was not authorized to speak with SEC leaders due to the agency’s ongoing legal action against the crypto platform. In May last year, 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 as the company represented.
Konanykhin said the legal dispute was led by dishonest agency agents (former SEC Chairman Gary Gensler’s “henchmen”) who 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 President Mark Uyeda.)
“We are prohibited from speaking to Atkins or other commissioners, so they have no way of knowing they were defrauded by ‘dirty cops,’ remnants of 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 fund the event in which Atkins and Commissioner Hester Peirce are the first two speakers highlighted on the summit website, in a list that also includes Konanykhin.
When asked about the confluence of Unicoin and its agency adversary at the upcoming summit, organizers responded with a statement saying: “Businesses are coming to the Digital Chamber DC Summit because it’s an opportunity to educate and build bridges.”
An SEC spokesperson declined to comment on the situation.
Konanykhin’s company further sought to educate the SEC with a campaign involving trucks driving around downtown Washington and past the agency, decorated with pointed messages including the sentiment: “The war on crypto is NOT over.”
The CEO threaded a needle in his harsh criticism of the SEC. He praised Atkins for “steadily repairing the damage done to the crypto industry by his predecessor,” but he insisted that the agency’s enforcement staff are sabotaging Atkins by continuing Gensler’s legal fight with the digital assets industry, despite the fact that the SEC has dismissed or delayed other major crypto enforcement cases pursued under Gensler.
Additionally, the current securities fraud charges against Unicoin were brought last year, when Republican Commissioner Uyeda was acting chairman. The lawsuit was approved by a committee that then included two Republicans and one Democrat, without any dissenting statements. But Konanykhin says the enforcement attorneys won approval without discussion, arguing that “rejecting a staff recommendation is the exception rather than the rule.”
The policy summit, one of the most important annual crypto events in Washington, features a code of conduct that calls for “a safe and welcoming environment that promotes open dialogue and the free expression of ideas.” Although Konanykhin may want to tell Atkins that his law enforcement team “grossly fabricated absurd accusations against Unicoin and its executives,” the legal constraints against him will not allow for this open dialogue.
