Company: GBTC
Filing Date: 2025-02-28
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0000950170-25-029408
Chunk: 114

Company: Grayscale Bitcoin Trust ETF
Filing Date: 2025-02-28
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1A
Chunk 114
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. dollars. Any assertion that a digital asset or transactions in that digital asset are a security or securities transactions, respectively, by the SEC or another regulatory authority may have similar effects. 

For example, in 2020 the SEC filed a complaint against the issuer of XRP, Ripple Labs, Inc., and two of its executives, alleging that they raised more than $1.3 billion through XRP sales that should have been registered under the federal securities laws, but were 

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not. In the years prior to the SEC’s action, XRP’s market capitalization at times reached over $140 billion. However, in the weeks following the SEC’s complaint, XRP’s market capitalization fell to less than $10 billion, which was less than half of its market capitalization in the days prior to the complaint. 

Subsequently, in July 2023, the District Court for the Southern District of New York held that while XRP is not a security, certain sales of XRP to certain buyers (but not other types of sales to other buyers) amounted to “investment contracts” under the Howey test. The District Court entered a final judgment in the case on August 7, 2024. On January 15, 2025 the SEC filed an appeal against the judgment with the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

Likewise, in the days following the announcement of SEC enforcement actions against certain digital asset issuers and trading platforms, the price of various digital assets have declined significantly and may continue to decline as such cases advance through the federal court system. Furthermore, the decisions in cases involving digital assets have resulted in seemingly inconsistent views of different district court judges, including one that explicitly disagreed with the analysis underlying the decision regarding XRP, which underscore the continuing uncertainty around which digital assets, or transactions in digital assets, are securities and what the correct analysis is to determine each digital asset’s status. For example, the conflicting district court opinions and analyses demonstrate that factors such as how long a digital asset has been in existence, how widely held it is, how large its market capitalization is, the manner in which it is offered, sold or promoted, and whether it has actual use in commercial transactions, ultimately may have limited to no bearing on whether the SEC, a state securities regulator or any particular court will find it to be a security.

In addition, if Bitcoin, or transactions in Bitcoin, is in fact a security, the Trust could be considered an unregistered “investment company” under the Investment Company