It's not just the Bitcoin exchanges Binance and Coinbase that the SEC is declaring war on. A whole range of altcoins such as Solana (SOL), BNB, ADA and DASH are being classified as securities by the authority. Binance deletes the first trading pairs.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is getting serious. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is filing charges against two of the country's largest crypto exchanges. The responsible parties are threatened with heavy fines and possible jail time. In addition to the exchanges, several coins and tokens are also being targeted by the regulator. Will a whole range of cryptocurrencies now be delisted?

These coins are at stake

Both in the complaint against Coinbase as in the complaint against Binance, the SEC lists a whole range of coins that the authority says fall into the category of securities under the Securities Act of 1943.

If this categorization is correct, the exchanges would have required a license to trade in securities. The problem: neither Coinbase nor Binance has such a license.

According to the SEC, the following assets are presumed to be securities: SOL, ADA, MATIC, FIL, SAND, AXS, CHZ, FLOW, ICP, NEAR, VGX, DASH, NEXO, ATOM, ALGO and COTI.

Note: None of the cryptocurrencies listed are Proof of Work (PoW) coins. They all use alternative consensus mechanisms, with most relying on Proof of Stake (PoS). This is consistent with the line of the SEC, which categorizes both Coinbase and Binance's Staking-as-a-Service as an illegal investment service.

Is a sell-off looming now?

No question: doubts about the legal status of crypto assets do not exactly inspire confidence among U.S. investors. This is also reflected in price action. Solana, for example, has moved 9 percent south since the SEC hammer.

Binance Coin (BNB) has been hit even harder. The native token of the Binance Smart Chain has lost 13 percent of its value since the bad news from Washington. No wonder: the SEC also classifies BNB as a security and pays special attention to the token: the search word "BNB" appears 153 times in the SEC document.

Binance deletes first trading pairs

While Coinbase has yet to take action, Binance has already removed the first trading pairs from its platform.

Other U.S. trading platforms are also getting cold feet. Representatives of the investment app Robinhood announced during a hearing before the U.S. Congress on June 6 that they would review certain coins offered on the platform. The deletion of coins is not desirable from the point of view of investors. After all, capital inflows and asset liquidity suffer.

Only Bitcoin, however, has received top-level recognition. SEC chief Gary Gensler has repeatedly called the mother of all cryptocurrencies a "commodity." For the last in February of this year.