TrustToken, TrueCoin settle with SEC over TUSD allegations

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced a settlement with TrustToken and TrueCoin for defrauding investors regarding TrueUSD.

As part of the settlement, the two will pay $163,000 each, with TrueCoin paying a disgorgement of $340,000. Neither confirmed nor denied the SEC’s findings.

“The complaint alleges that, by approximately March 2022, after the TUSD operations had been sold to an offshore entity, that entity and TrueCoin had invested more than half a billion dollars of the assets purportedly backing TUSD in the speculative fund, and that, by Fall 2022, TrueCoin and TrustToken became aware of redemption problems at the offshore fund but continued to make false statements to investors casting TUSD as backed one-for-one by US dollars,” the SEC’s press release said. 

Read more: Lawmakers clash early on in first full SEC commissioner hearing since 2019 

“As alleged, by September 2024, 99% of the reserves backing TUSD were invested in the speculative fund.” 

The complaint filed by the SEC alleged that the defendants “offered and sold TUSD together with profit-making opportunities.”

The SEC, in its filing, said that the investors invested in a common enterprise — one of the prong’s of the Howey test — which would back up an alleged claim that TUSD fell under the SEC’s securities definition.

Read more: Rep. Torres: SEC invented ‘crypto asset security’ out of thin air

In January of this year, the stability of TUSD was called into question after the stablecoin depegged, dipping below a dollar. It claimed to be the “first” dollar-backed stablecoin to have “live on-chain attestations.”

Carlos Mercado, a data scientist at Flipside Crypto, told Blockworks at the time: “I don’t know how TrueUSD was structured, but clearly off-chain liquidity reliance caused a breakdown in people’s trust of the token. In the long term, if sufficient backing is there somewhere, it will re-peg at a lower market cap.”

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