COURT DENIES MDL IN CRYPTO LAWSUIT TRIFECTA
A federal panel refused to bundle three crypto-related suits into one Illinois courtroom, leaving plaintiffs to fight their battles separately across three districts. The decision keeps pressure on exchanges and token issuers alive in multiple jurisdictions, raising compliance costs and litigation risk.
Anthony Motto asked the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation to consolidate Greene v. (unnamed exchange) with two similar cases filed in California and Pennsylvania. Motto argued that common questions of law—chiefly whether certain digital assets qualify as unregistered securities—would benefit from a single judge’s oversight. Opposing parties countered that the cases involve distinct platforms, tokens, and fact patterns, making centralization inefficient.
The Panel, chaired by Judge Sarah S. Vance, sided with the defendants. It found that although each suit touches on the same broad regulatory questions, the differences in trading interfaces, token mechanics, and state-law claims outweighed any efficiency gains from consolidation. Separate discovery tracks, the judges reasoned, would move faster and reduce the chance that one outlier ruling skews outcomes for everyone else.
In plain terms, the ruling keeps three separate fronts open. Plaintiffs can still press their securities claims, but each case must now clear its own procedural hurdles instead of riding a single, coordinated train. For exchanges and issuers, that means duplicative document requests, parallel depositions, and the possibility of conflicting district-court rulings that could be appealed piecemeal to different circuit courts.
The decision leaves SEC and CFTC authority questions untouched for now, yet it amplifies the decentralization-versus-regulation tension by forcing platforms to defend the same conduct in multiple venues. Stablecoin and token-classification risk remains high: any one of these suits could produce precedent that ripples across DeFi liquidity pools and offshore exchange listings.
Traders should expect continued volatility in governance tokens and exchange tokens until at least one of the three cases yields a dispositive ruling on the Howey-test question.
Watch the Northern District of Illinois—Greene still moves first, and its outcome may set de-facto guardrails even without formal centralization.