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The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has amended its filings against Tron founder Justin Sun on the grounds of jurisdiction.
In March 2023, the SEC alleged that Sun sold unregistered securities – a familiar charge faced by the wider crypto industry.
Sun’s lawyers claimed that the claims were “out of the SEC’s regulatory reach” and that the regulator failed to establish “personal jurisdiction over each foreign defendant for each claim.”
“This case originates with foreign digital asset offerings to foreign purchasers on global platforms,” the lawyers added.
On Thursday, the SEC amended its complaint to highlight that Sun travelled "extensively" to the US to market Tron, BitTorrent and Rainberry.
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“Specifically, Sun spent more than 80 days in the United States in 2017, more than 120 days in the United States in 2018, and approximately 180 days in the United States in 2019. During Sun’s business trips to the United States in 2019, he spent time in various cities, including New York City, Boston, Massachusetts, and San Francisco,” the SEC added to its complaint.
The SEC claimed that Sun broadcasted a livestream from his San Francisco office to promote the Tron (TRX) token.
“During the livestream, Sun explained that BTT would benefit TRX holders because ‘the current Tron community’ would be allocated with BTT, meaning that TRX holders would be ‘entitled’ to receive ‘the BTT airdrop.’ Sun stated that, because of the relationship between TRX and BTT, ‘the TRX community [was] tied with the BTT community,’” the complaint claims.
The SEC's most recent crypto target was Uniswap, which was issued with a Wells Notice.
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The reasons behind the SEC's warning are not clear but Uniswap has been under the regulator's microscope for quite some time. In the blog post, Uniswap refutes the SEC's definition of a token as a security.
