U.S. Chamber of Commerce Adds Voice to Grayscale Lawsuit Against ETF Move

The biggest pro-business lobby in America is joining with a friend of the court filing in favor of Grayscale Investments’ lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce amicus curiae brief, supporting the contention that the SEC disapproved the proposed conversion of the firm’s bitcoin trust to an ETF.  The Chamber has been slow to move into voicing its position on issues affecting the crypto space.

The filing, The Block reports, says the SEC’s decision against Grayscale’s planned ETF reflects “a paternalistic belief that the agency knows better than investors” and that the SEC’s policy decisions often “depart drastically” from SEC precedent.

“This approach has enabled the commission to pick winners and losers without having to account for its reasoning to the interested public or to the courts, thereby depriving investors of the freedom to make their own investment choices and businesses of the certainty they need to innovate and meet investor demand,” the brief states.

Hours after the SEC rejected Grayscale’s application in June to morph its flagship product into an ETF, the company asked the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review the decision. 

The amicus brief filed by the US Chamber of Commerce, as well as other briefs by crypto exchange Coinbase and the Blockchain Association, come after Grayscale filed its opening brief in the suit last week. 

The 100-page document claims that the regulator is making an “arbitrary and capricious” action as defined by the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). It points out the SEC’s approval of ETFs holding bitcoin futures contracts — the price of which, Grayscale says, is subject to identical risk of fraud and manipulation as the spot price of bitcoin.