SEC signaled a Binance complaint amendment, not a retreat on 10 tokens

A joint filing by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Binance defendants entered the federal court record on July 30, 2024, disclosed that the SEC intended to seek permission to amend its complaint, including its allegations concerning 10 third-party crypto assets.

The development mattered because those allegations reached beyond Binance. They implicated tokens associated with several of the largest blockchain networks and sat inside the SEC’s broader effort to apply federal securities law to crypto trading platforms. But the filing did not declare any token a non-security, withdraw the case, or decide the legal status of any asset.

What the filing actually said

Document 253 in SEC v. Binance Holdings Limited said the agency intended to seek leave to amend its complaint “including with respect to” what it had called the Third Party Crypto Asset Securities. That proposed amendment, the SEC said, removed the need for the court to rule on the sufficiency of the token-related allegations “at this time.”

Those qualifiers defined the event. Seeking leave is a procedural step: the court had not yet approved an amendment, and the SEC had not filed the proposed amended complaint. The phrase “at this time” postponed a ruling; it did not establish a permanent exemption or a merits judgment.

The 10 assets identified in the SEC’s June 5, 2023 complaint were SOL, ADA, MATIC, FIL, ATOM, SAND, MANA, ALGO, AXS and COTI. The agency alleged that units of those assets had been offered and sold as investment contracts and therefore as securities. Those remained allegations, contested by the defendants and not resolved by the July 30 filing.

A schedule, not a surrender

The parties agreed on a proposed briefing sequence. The SEC’s motion to amend would be due within 30 days after the court entered a scheduling order; defendants would receive another 30 days to respond, and the SEC would then have 21 days to reply. They disagreed over when discovery should begin.

Binance and the other defendants said the amendment detail was disclosed to them at 11:53 p.m. Eastern on July 29 and suggested changes beyond the third-party-token claims. That timing and interpretation were the defendants’ contemporaneous representations in the joint document, not an independent court finding.

The distinction was important because some early accounts treated the filing as if the SEC had dropped its position on Solana, Cardano, Polygon and the other named assets. Contemporaneous Axios coverage corrected its headline and article to say the agency intended to amend, not drop, the claims. The primary record supports the corrected, narrower formulation.

The court had already narrowed the dispute

The filing followed Judge Amy Berman Jackson’s June 28, 2024 ruling on motions to dismiss. The court allowed most of the SEC’s case to proceed, including registration claims against the Binance platforms and a claim involving Binance.US staking. It dismissed the claim involving BUSD, the claim involving Simple Earn, and the portion of the BNB claim based on secondary sales by sellers other than Binance, while allowing other claims to continue.

The opinion also distinguished a crypto token from the transaction or scheme in which it was sold. It cautioned that the decision did not determine whether crypto assets themselves were or were not securities. That left the SEC to decide whether more detailed allegations could better connect the named assets, their offers and sales, and Binance’s platform activity to the investment-contract test.

What July 30 established

The verified development was therefore a change in pleading strategy and litigation timing. It reduced the chance of an immediate ruling on whether the existing allegations concerning the 10 tokens were legally sufficient, but it did not resolve their status or erase the SEC’s surviving claims against Binance.

No reliable event-day market conclusion follows from the court filing alone, so this reconstruction makes no token-price or return claim. On July 30, the content of the proposed amendment, the court’s response and the eventual scope of the case remained unknown.