Vitalik Buterin voices concern about SEC's treatment of Solana and other projects

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has voiced his sympathy towards blockchain projects like Solana that have been targeted in recent enforcement actions by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission against crypto exchanges.

"The one comment I'll make is that I feel bad that Solana and other projects are getting hit in this way," Buterin said, responding to a question from Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang about how he feels about the U.S. policy approach to crypto. "They don't deserve it, and if Ethereum ends up 'winning' through all other blockchains getting kicked off exchanges, that's not an honorable way to win, and in the long term probably isn't even a victory."

The SEC earlier this month sued crypto exchanges Coinbase, Binance and Binance.US, alleging they all offer trading in tokens it deems unregistered securities. The regulator named over a dozen tokens, including Solana's SOL, Polygon's MATIC and Algorand's ALGO, saying they are all unregistered securities.

Buterin highlighted that Ethereum's real competition is not other blockchains but "the rapidly expanding centralized world that is imposing itself on us as we speak." He wished for "all honorable projects" to have a fair outcome in the current situation.

Companies and projects fight back

Responding to the SEC's declaration of SOL as a security, the Solana Foundation recently said it disagrees with the characterization and welcomes the continued engagement of policymakers to achieve legal clarity on these issues. Polygon Labs also responded to the SEC's claims recently that MATIC is an unregistered security, saying that the token was "developed outside the U.S., deployed outside the U.S. and focused to this day on the global community that supports the network."

Coinbase and Binance have been fighting with the SEC amid the lawsuits. Earlier this week, Coinbase filed a motion to dismiss the SEC lawsuit, while Binance took an early court loss as a federal judge denied a request from Binance's lawyers to rebuke the SEC over language it used in a press release.