UPDATE 🔥🔥

The chief of the SEC is headlining an event sponsored by a crypto firm at war with it.

SEC Chairman Paul Atkins is a marquee speaker at a policy summit backed by Unicoin, whose CEO says the agency chief is being duped by his staff.

WHAT TO KNOW:

Unicoin has accused the SEC of waging a war against it, but the company also stepped up as lead sponsor for a Washington policy summit at which the SEC chair will be headlining.

Unicoin's CEO told CoinDesk that he thinks SEC Chairman Paul Atkins has been conned by holdover enforcement "henchmen" who helped previous SEC Chair Gary Gensler legally hammer crypto businesses.

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Atkins is a top speaker at the Digital Chamber's DC Blockchain Summit next month, and the event's chief sponsor — Unicoin — is in a legal fight with the agency, claiming the SEC's chairman is being misled into perpetuating a legacy war on crypto.

The chief executive for Unicoin, which is the summit's "platinum" sponsor, says his company is not allowed to speak with the SEC's leaders due to the agency's ongoing legal action against the crypto platform. In May last year, the SEC sued the company and its executives, including CEO Alexander Konanykhin, accusing them of raising $100 million for tokens that weren't backed by real estate in the way the firm represented.

Konanykhin said that the legal clash is pursued by rogue agency enforcers (the "henchmen" of former SEC Chair Gary Gensler) that have misled current SEC Chairman Paul Atkins. (The case may have begun under Gensler's tenure, but the resulting lawsuit was filed last year under then-Acting Chair Mark Uyeda.)

"We are prohibited from talking to Atkins or other commissioners, so they have no way of knowing that they have been defrauded by 'dirty cops,' holdovers from Gensler's War on Crypto," Konanykhin wrote in a message to CoinDesk.

Unicoin executives may not be able to speak with Atkins, but the company is helping pay for the event at which Atkins and Commissioner Hester Peirce are the Konanykhin.

#SEC