SEC accuses Safemoon, a DeFi protocol in the BNB Chain ecosystem, and its executives of fraud and unregistered securities issuance.

BlockBeats reported on November 2nd that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged SafeMoon LLC, a DeFi protocol in the BNB Chain ecosystem, and its founder Kyle Nagy, SafeMoon US LLC, CEO John Karony, and CTO Thomas Smith with a massive fraudulent scheme using the unregistered cryptocurrency security SafeMoon. The SEC pointed out that the defendants promised to take the token price "safely to the moon", but not only did they fail to bring profits, they also lost billions of dollars in market value, extracted over $200 million worth of cryptocurrency assets from the project, and misappropriated investor funds for personal use. SafeMoon's price skyrocketed over 55,000% between March 12th and April 20th, 2021, with a market value of $5.7 billion. However, when the public learned on April 20th, 2021, that SafeMoon's liquidity pool was not locked as claimed, its price plummeted nearly 50%.