On 19th September, 2022, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against a YouTuber and crypto researcher named Ian Balina. The SEC accused Balina for conducting an unregistered Sparkster (SPKR) tokens offering. He was said to conduct this offering through a Telegram account. This was amongst several other complaints against Balina.
On the basis of this lawsuit, the agency went on to claim there is a more dense cluster of Ethereum transactions within the United States. This is relatively more than any country in the world.
According to the SEC, many investors in the United States invested in the investing pool created by Balina. The investments in ETH were done by a whole network of nodes based upon the Ethereum blockchain. This instance held responsible to cluster the ETH transactions more densely in the US. This way, all the transactions took place within the region, the agency said.
Prominent Ethereum network and node explorer Etherenodes stated that out of overall 7807 Ethereum nodes, approx 42.56% are currently residing in the US. However, claims of the SEC are under suspicion if they would sustain within the court.
Balina’s Defense has to Counter ETH Nodes Cluster Claim
An RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub Senior REsearch Fellow and Australian Lawyer, Dr. Aaron Lane said the most relevant part of all here is that the plaintiff is from the US, the defendant also belongs to the US and even the transaction is also said to be initiated from the US. Considering this as a crucial base, everything else does not matter regardless of the payment method, be it on Ethereum network, using Mastercard or any other alike payment network.
Lane further added that although the SEC has made an interesting claim, yet if the prosecution from Balina does not take part in the argument against the issue of jurisdiction, it is supposed to make no impact on upcoming cases.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/09/20/sec-filed-lawsuit-against-crypto-researcher-claiming-cluster-of-eth-nodes/