Binance.US, the U.S.-based arm of crypto exchange Binance, delisted a small cryptocurrency in the wake of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s investigation into insider trading at rival Coinbase Global Inc., the Wall Street Journal reported. Binance on Monday said that it was delisting the AMP token as of Aug. 15. The cryptocurrency trades for less than a penny with a market value of less than $400 million, according to CoinMarketCap. Despite its small size, AMP looms large because it was one of nine cryptocurrencies cited by the SEC as unregistered securities as part of its investigation of insider trading at Coinbase. The entire crypto industry has grown up without clear definitions of the assets within it and regulations for trading. The SEC has informally said that the two largest tokens, bitcoin and ether, aren’t securities. However, both the current SEC chairman, Gary Gensler, and his predecessor, Jay Clayton, said that most cryptocurrencies meet the legal definition of a security, potentially putting crypto exchanges in the position of selling unregistered securities. Binance said its decision was based on the fact that AMP was the only one of the nine cryptocurrencies in the insider-trading case that trades on its platform.
