Uyeda: SEC Dropped a Dozen Crypto Cases Over Credibility

At least a dozen federal enforcement cases against crypto companies were dismissed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission starting in early 2025, according to Democratic members of the House Financial Services Committee. Former acting SEC Chair Mark Uyeda said this week that the dismissals happened not because the cases lacked legal merit, but because pursuing them in court would have undercut the agency's credibility as it prepared to reverse its crypto policy.

What Uyeda said this week

Speaking on a Wednesday panel at the Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy's Financial Markets Quality Conference, Uyeda, who served as acting SEC chair before Paul Atkins was confirmed, said the agency dropped civil cases against crypto companies filed under the previous administration because it was preparing a "180-degree change" in rulemaking. He said continuing to argue the government's position in court would have hurt the agency's credibility in arguing positions in court contrary to its planned policy changes. Uyeda also said there had been "significant concerns" that the cases against crypto companies were "justifiable under law."

The crypto trade outlet TFTC, which also covered the panel, reported that Uyeda confirmed on the record that the agency dismissed at least a dozen Gensler-era crypto enforcement cases because litigating a '180-degree' policy reversal would have damaged its credibility in court. TFTC added that most cases were dropped with prejudice, a legal term meaning the same claims cannot be refiled.

Which cases were dropped, and when

Under Uyeda, who was acting SEC chair from January to April 2025, the commission dropped cases filed against Kraken, Ripple Labs, Coinbase and others in what many critics characterized as payback for the industry's support of President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign. Trump had promised to fire former SEC Chair Gary Gensler, under whom many of the cases were filed, "on day one" if elected, and Gensler resigned the day Trump took office.

The Coinbase case moved fastest. NBC News reported that on Feb. 21, 2025, Coinbase announced the SEC would drop its lawsuit, in a release the exchange titled "Righting a major wrong," saying SEC staff had agreed in principle to dismiss the suit filed during the Biden administration, which had accused the exchange of acting as an unregistered securities broker. The SEC formally closed the case six days later; its own press release states that the dismissal rests on the judgment that it will facilitate the Commission's ongoing efforts to reform its regulatory approach to crypto, not on any assessment of the merits of the claims.

Kraken's case took longer to unwind, and the exact dismissal date depends on which document is checked. Kraken announced on March 3, 2025, that the SEC had agreed to dismiss the lawsuit, with no admission of wrongdoing, no penalties paid and no changes to its business. But according to the House Financial Services Committee Democrats' letter to Chairman Atkins, the court paperwork came later: on March 27, 2025, the SEC and Kraken filed a joint stipulation to dismiss the case with prejudice. The gap between the March 3 announcement and the March 27 filing reflects the time it took to finalize the stipulation after Kraken's public statement.

The key figures

Courts had already ruled on some of these cases

Uyeda's framing, that the cases were dropped partly because of doubts about their legal footing, sits awkwardly next to the court record in at least one instance. Before the SEC dropped its Kraken case, a federal judge had already ruled against the exchange's attempt to get the suit thrown out. The House Financial Services Committee Democrats' letter states that on August 23, 2024, the SEC successfully defeated Kraken's motion to dismiss, with Judge William Orrick finding that the SEC had plausibly alleged securities-law violations tied to some of Kraken's crypto transactions. That is a lower legal bar than a final merits ruling, but it means a court had already sided with the SEC's theory of the case before the agency chose to drop it anyway. The same letter argues that the SEC had, across its 2025 retreat, dismissed or closed at least one dozen crypto-related cases, including meritorious litigated cases against Binance, Coinbase, and Kraken, in which it had received favorable rulings from the courts, a characterization that conflicts with any suggestion the cases were legally weak. The SEC's own dismissal filings, by contrast, explicitly avoid taking a position on the merits either way, saying only that dismissal serves the agency's policy-reform goals.

What this means for crypto investors and companies

The dismissals do not amount to a ruling that the tokens or business practices at issue were legal all along. The SEC's Coinbase dismissal notice is explicit that the decision does not reflect any judgment on the underlying claims and does not set a position for other pending matters. For a company like Kraken, a dismissal "with prejudice" means the SEC cannot bring the same specific claims again, which removes that particular legal overhang, but it does not immunize the industry from future enforcement under different legal theories or under a future SEC leadership with different priorities.

What remains unresolved is what standard the SEC will apply going forward, and how much of the 2025 retreat could itself be reversed under a future chair. The January 2026 letter from House Financial Services Committee Democrats shows that oversight of these dismissals continued more than a year after they happened, meaning the debate over whether the SEC's 2025 pullback from crypto enforcement was a legal or a political decision had not closed as of that writing.