Earlier quoted context omitted.
They repeatedly refer to lengthy sets of questions they received from the SEC, both in person and in writing. If you don’t think that is the SEC communicating their “rationale” for a decision and offering insight into what acceptable alternatives might look like then you obviously haven’t dealt with the SEC, nor do you understand what it is that they do. (I actually do have some relevant experience here - I was a par…
> Despite Coinbase keeping Lend off the market and providing detailed information, the SEC still won’t explain why they see a problem. Rather they have now told us that if we launch Lend they intend to sue. Yet again, we asked if the SEC would share their reasoning with us, and yet again they refused. Plain as day! And as to experience, I was CTO of the first company to settle with the SEC for an ICO: https://www.sec…
Plain as day!
And since you have so much experience dealing with the SEC, you surely understand that the specific questions they ask will typically reveal precisely their rationale for taking the (extraordinary) step of an enforcement action, just as a prosecutor’s investigatory questions reveals their legal theory of a crime.
The SEC doesn’t go around issuing Wells notices every day, and they typically don’t issue them without giving recipients the opportunity to choose a different path. We’re only hearing one side of this story, and even that one side contains so many hints of willful obtuseness that you have to be a blind partisan to take Coinbase’s “shock” at face value.