COURT REJECTS BID TO CENTRALIZE CRYPTO CASES
Three crypto lawsuits will stay scattered across federal courts after a judicial panel refused to consolidate them. The decision keeps enforcement actions alive in Illinois, California, and Pennsylvania, preserving multiple legal fronts and leaving defendants exposed to separate, possibly conflicting rulings.
Plaintiff Anthony Motto asked the Panel to pull the Greene case from the Northern District of Illinois together with two other actions in the Central District of California and the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Motto argued that common questions of fact and law—chiefly whether certain digital assets qualify as securities or commodities—warranted a single courtroom. The Panel, chaired by Sarah S. Vance, reviewed the request and found the cases too distinct in their procedural posture and factual details to justify centralization.
Judges weighed the risk of duplicative discovery and inconsistent pretrial rulings against the practical burden of forcing three courts to coordinate. They concluded that the differences in claims, parties, and local practices outweighed any efficiency gains. The motion was denied, meaning each district will continue to manage its own timeline, evidence, and potential settlement talks.
The ruling keeps the cases on parallel tracks rather than merging them under one judge. Plaintiffs and defendants alike will now litigate across multiple jurisdictions, raising costs and extending the window for discovery fights and summary-judgment motions. Regulators may view the outcome as a signal that courts are willing to let individual districts shape precedent on token classification, rather than forcing a uniform national approach.
For crypto markets, the decision signals that the SEC and CFTC can press their theories in separate venues without immediate fear of a single judge slamming the door on all three actions at once. This multi-front pressure sustains uncertainty around whether tokens function as securities, commodities, or something else, complicating exchange compliance programs and DeFi protocol design. Traders face a longer period of headline risk and possible venue-shopping by regulators.
The lack of consolidation raises the odds that conflicting district-court rulings will emerge, giving appellate courts—and eventually the Supreme Court—more material to settle the securities-versus-commodity debate.