SEC Chairman Gary Gensler has offered to serve as an advisor to Binance, according to lawyers representing the cryptocurrency exchange and its founder, Changpeng Zhao.
According to CNBC's June 7 report, SEC filings on June 7 show that lawyers for Gibson & Dunn and Latham & Watkins said Gensler offered to serve as an advisor to the exchange in March 2019. However, a previous Wall Street Journal report in March indicated that Binance actually first approached Gensler for an advisory role in 2018.
Ella Zhang, then head of Binance Ventures, and Harry Zhou, co-founder of Binance Ventures Koi Trading, first met with Gensler in October 2018, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cites sources and documents from 2018 to 2020. offered him a consultant position. Gensler later declined the offer. Additionally, Gensler was approached by multiple private companies as a consultant while on the MIT faculty, but he rejected all offers, the report said.
US President Joe Biden nominated Gensler to serve as SEC chairman in February 2021, and he was sworn in on April 17, 2021. Before joining the SEC, he was Professor of the Practice of Global Economics and Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. From 2017 to 2019, he served as Chairman of the Maryland Financial Consumer Protection Commission. The SEC sued Binance on June 5 for failing to register as a securities exchange and allegedly operating illegally in the United States. Financial watchdog brings 13 char ges against crypto exchange, including unregistered BNB offering and sale
Binance Coin and Binance Dollar Tokens and their staking schemes.
On June 7, Binance sent out a message through its Chinese social media channels, announcing that it was “different” from other cryptocurrency exchanges amid heightened regulatory action against it. In the statement, Binance said its wallet addresses are transparent and that the exchange has never "stealed consumers' funds." Additionally, Binance said it has never provided “significant donations” to political candidates, or “significant sponsorships” to entertainment and media entities — a no-no for now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Such a sub tle nod to the approach adopted.
On the same day, Zhao pointed out that the SEC never prosecuted FTX, although Gensler claimed in an interview that there were many “similarities” between the two companies, sparking debate on Twitter.
