The SEC investigation against Crypto.com has closed, and CRO rises

Yesterday, the journalist Eleanor Terrett reported that the SEC has officially closed its investigation on Crypto.com.

Subsequently, the confirmation also came from the company’s CEO, Kris Marszalek.

The reaction of the CRO price was immediate, but not particularly significant.

The SEC against Crypto.com

The SEC had started investigating the exchange Crypto.com some time ago, to the point that the exchange initially decided to completely exit the U.S. market.

In October 2024, Crypto.com had received a Wells Notice from the agency, notifying it of the start of official investigations.

However, the situation changed the following month, with the electoral victory of Donald Trump.

After the victory of Joe Biden in November 2020, the presidency of the agency was entrusted to the Democrat Gary Gensler in April 2021, and since then the SEC has launched a kind of war against cryptocurrencies and against crypto exchanges.

This strategy continued until November of last year, when with the victory of the Republican Trump, Gensler announced his resignation, which then became effective starting from the day of Trump’s inauguration at the White House, on January 20, 2025. 

Now the agency’s strategy has completely changed, also because it is currently led pro tempore by the repubblicano Mark Uyeda, favorable to crypto, and it is expected that its leadership will be entrusted to Paul Atkins, who is also favorable to crypto.

It is not surprising, therefore, that after initiating and closing many cases against crypto companies, the SEC eventually also closed the one against Crypto.com.

The consequences

As revealed by Eleanor Terrett, and confirmed by Kris Marszalek, the SEC lawsuit against Crypto.com has been closed without any enforcement actions being taken against the exchange. 

In fact, this initiative by the agency that oversees the American securities market turned out to be completely useless in the end, as well as unnecessarily costly for both the exchange and the agency itself. It should be remembered that the SEC is funded, of course, with taxes paid by taxpayers. 

It should also be added that the same exchange had in turn sued the SEC for abuse of jurisdiction, after receiving the Wells Notice, because the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission should only deal with the securities market, and not with that of commodities, whose oversight is entrusted to the CFTC. 

The key point of the entire SEC strategy was precisely to consider many cryptocurrencies as securities, that is, investment contracts, and not simple commodities. Only Bitcoin was certainly identified as a commodity, while the agency even had some doubts about Ethereum. 

Finally, it should be noted that in 2023 a court explicitly ruled against the SEC on this very point, within a lawsuit against Ripple concerning XRP, as it explicitly ruled that the sale of XRP on the secondary market (the exchanges) could not be considered the sale of investment contracts.

The reaction of CRO’s price after Crypto.com’s victory against the SEC

CRO is the native cryptocurrency of the Cronos project, behind which, however, there is Crypto.com itself.

For almost three years now, the price of CRO has been struggling, to the point of still being at -89% from the highs of 2021. 

To tell the truth, that of 2021 was an evident speculative bubble that burst the following year, so much so that the initial price at the end of 2020 was enormously lower. 

The big problem is that before the bubble started to inflate, CRO was sailing around 6 cents of the dollar, while now it is around 10 cents. 

In fact, at the end of October 2024, it had even dropped below 8 cents, dangerously close to those 6 cents it had exactly four years earlier. 

The situation is therefore evidently difficult, so much so that the maximum peak reached in December thanks to the Trump trade was only slightly above 20 cents, which is a figure in line with that of mid-May 2022 after the collapse of the crypto markets generated by the implosion of the Terra/Luna ecosystem. 

Moreover, after climbing above 20 cents in December, the price of CRO had returned to just above 7 cents in February, that is, only a few thousandths of a dollar above the very low level of October 2024. 

Just consider that the current price level, despite the good news, is still lower than that of May 2024. 

The problem of the increase in supply

The fact is that an enormous sword of Damocles hangs over CRO. 

Recently, a significant increase in the total supply was decided, rising from 27 to 97 billion tokens.

For the markets, what really matters is the circulating supply, which has remained below 27 billion tokens, but now nothing prevents putting into circulation part of the 70 billion new tokens that have been created. 

If a significant portion of these new tokens were to be put into circulation (that is, end up in the circulating supply), the selling pressure could increase significantly, causing the price to drop. 

This is possible to happen in the coming years, while it does not seem that there is a risk of it occurring in the short term, and this makes it difficult to imagine truly interesting price performances for this cryptocurrency in the coming years.