Coinbase, the exchange that serviced the greatest number of US customers, appeared willing to take more regulatory risk. It listed roughly five hundred coins, including some that the SEC pretty clearly viewed as securities, and its CEO, Brian Armstrong, took to Twitter to criticize the regulators for “sketchy behavior.” Coinbase itself had no excha

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In two years, Binance’s share of crypto trading had boomed, from 10 percent to 50 percent. It offered financial products that local regulators either had banned or had yet to approve, and the regulators did not seem willing to do much about it. Binance’s own exchange token, called BNB, was an example. BNB was to Binance what FTT was to FTX: a claim

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In their willingness to court the wrath of US financial regulators, the crypto exchanges fell into one of at least four categories. A small group of tiny US exchanges listed only bitcoin and ether, the two oldest coins, blessed by the SEC as commodities and openly regulated by the CFTC. (A bit oddly, the older the coin, the more people thought of i

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