Robinhood, a popular mobile trading platform for stocks that also allows user to buy and sell cryptocurrency, received an investigative subpoena from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in December 2022 regarding its cryptocurrency business.
The subpoena asked for information about Robinhood’s “supported cryptocurrencies, custody of cryptocurrencies, and platform operations,” according to the company’s annual report for 2022, which was filed on Monday.
The mention in the annual report was brief and did not specify why the subpoena was issued or what information the SEC was looking for.
A spokesperson for Robinhood declined to comment when contacted by Coins2Day. A spokesperson for the SEC told Coins2Day that it “does not comment on the existence or nonexistence of a possible investigation.”
The subpoena, which came shortly after cryptocurrency exchange FTX declared bankruptcy in November 2022, comes as Robinhood struggles to reinvent its crypto business. The company reported continuing declines in its crypto trading revenue in the fourth quarter of 2022 and has tried to shed its affiliation with Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of FTX, after its board approved plans to buy back the more than $550 million-worth of shares Bankman-Fried had bought earlier on in 2022.
The SEC’s subpoena also comes amid a broader push by the agency to investigate, and in many cases punish, crypto and crypto-adjacent companies.
In January, the SEC charged both Gemini, a cryptocurrency exchange founded by the Winklevoss twins, as well as Genesis, owned by famed cryptocurrency investor Barry Silbert, with the unregistered offering and sale of securities through the companies’ joint yield-bearing product: Gemini Earn.
In February, the government arm responsible for overseeing the securities market reached a $30 million settlement with Kraken, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, after it claimed that the exchange’s staking feature was a securities offering.
And most recently, the SEC reportedly told Paxos, a stablecoin issuer, that it intended to sue the company for its work on BUSD, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. Dollar that was issued in partnership with Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange by trading volume. Paxos is reportedly in conversation with the SEC over the lawsuit threat.
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