By Hannah Lang
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday charged cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex Inc and its former CEO William Shihara with operating an unregistered national securities exchange, broker and clearing agency.
The SEC alleged in its complaint, which was filed in a U.S. district court in Washington, that Shihara coordinated with crypto asset issuers seeking to make their tokens available for trading on Bittrex’s platform to delete public statements that Shihara believed would lead regulators to investigate those token offerings as securities.