Coinbase Goes to Court Against the SEC

“Like all securities, an economic arrangement may qualify as an investment contract only if it involves an ongoing business enterprise whose management is connected with enforceable obligations to investors. In the absence of such obligations, the contract is simply an asset sale,” Coinbase argued. “Because transactions on Coinbase’s secondary market exchange do not involve any such obligations, and because the value that Coinbase buyers receive through these transactions that is vested in things bought and traded rather than in the businesses that produced them, the transactions are not securities transactions.”