A man goes before the king and he's sentenced to death. The king asks him if he has any last words and he says "I can make your horse talk!". "What?", said the king. "Yes, give me two years and I can make your horse talk". So the man's sentenced is suspended for two years and he walks out of the king's chamber and his friend comes up to him and says "I can't believe you told the king you could make his horse talk, you can't do that!" "I know that, you know that, but two years is a long time. Who knows what might happen? Maybe I'll die, maybe the king'll die, or maybe the horse will talk."

The king died. Uniswap, Robinhood, and other platforms on the wrong side of the SEC have won this round. Or, at worst, a reprieve until the next administration changes course. Or perhaps until legislative efforts sort out what the law about crypto trading and marketplaces really is. The latter is what many companies have been calling for in the last few years, complaining of regulation by enforcement.

The biggest news this week is Uniswap's announcement that the SEC dropped their case against Uniswap for various securities offences. They'd been resisting this for quite a while, and it was set to be a major case for deciding aspects of decentralized exchanges (DEXs).

Robinhood's crypto division was also the target of SEC action, which was dropped this week too. Robinhood is a popular American app for trading stocks and crypto.

This week also saw the SEC drop its case against OpenSea, one of the largest NFT marketplaces.

Last week, the SEC dropped its case against Coinbase, one of the largest American players in the cryptocurrency trading market.

A couple weeks ago, the SEC also seemed to be putting a case against Binance on hold. Binance is one of the largest venues for cryptocurrency trading globally.

Sometimes the right answer is to wait and see if the government changes their approach. It doesn't happen very often, but any lawyers who recommended that to their clients, rather than settling are surely feeling proud of themselves with these victories. Although in fairness to these companies' legal strategy; they weren't just sitting still - all of them were actively defending. They also hired lobbyists to help get their industry's view across to the incoming Trump administration, and they're now reaping the rewards of these efforts.

The change in legal direction was signalled back in January with the Trump administration's release of pro-crypto statements. There's also the matter of the President's own memecoin, which launched the day before his inauguration. When anyone doing the same can point to the sitting President and say he did it too, there's a very interesting dynamic vis-a-vis regulators. Now, Trump didn't launch his own cryptocurrency trading platform, but the official memecoin is being traded in markets in the United States, and it's quite similar to many of the other tokens on these markets.

America has always been a major player in the crypto space, but it's now looking up for its leading companies. There's still regulatory chaos, but it's getting straightened out.