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  • 25 Sep 24

OpenSea is being sued for selling BAYC. But why?

A class action lawsuit has been filed against OpenSea for the sale of BAYC, with the SEC also implicated in the curious case.

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This is a continuation of the story related to the SEC’s legal attack on NFT/OpenSea. This protracted story is beginning to take on a somewhat curious tone. So the holders of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT, who earlier bought these NFTs on OpenSea, sued this crypto exchange — allegedly because of their legal battle with SEC the value of NFTs fell, and they as buyers unwittingly became holders of «illegal assets».

From the outside, this looks like a rather clumsy way to exit a losing asset by finding a third-party sponsor to «close the position» at a profit. It would have been much more interesting to see if they had blamed the SEC for their losses, but they chose to blame OpenSea for all their troubles. Now for the details of this snub.


So, the plaintiffs are citing old SEC cases involving NFT projects like Stoner Cats 2 and Impact Theory, where these tokens were indeed found to be unregistered securities.


According to the lawsuit, OpenSea knew about these precedents but continued to trade security. than misled them into buying «illegal» NFTs. According to them, OpenSea did not moderate its market properly, which helped the platform to enrich itself at the expense of commissions from token sales.


Recall, earlier we wrote about the legal attack on the NFT-industry by the SEC, which in early September said that NFTs have the characteristics of a security-asset, and therefore their turnover should be licensed. The SEC decided to try to prove this thesis on the example of a large NFT exchange — OpenSea.

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