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

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 first two speakers highlighted on the summit’s website, in a list that also includes Konanykhin.

When asked about the confluence of Unicoin and its agency adversary at the upcoming summit, the organizers responded with a statement, saying, “Companies come to the Digital Chamber’s DC Summit because it is an opportunity to educate and build bridges.”

An SEC spokesman declined to comment on the situation.

Konanykhin’s company has further sought to educate the SEC with a campaign involving trucks circulating around the center of Washington and past the agency, decorated with pointed messages that included the sentiment, “The War on Crypto is NOT over.”

The CEO has been threading a needle in his sharp criticism of the SEC. He praised Atkins for “steadily repairing the damage on the crypto industry inflicted by his predecessor,” but he insisted that the agency’s enforcement staff is sabotaging Atkins by maintaining Gensler’s legal fight with the digital assets sector, despite the fact the SEC dismissed or delayed the other major crypto enforcement cases pursued under Gensler.

Also, the current securities-fraud charges against Unicoin were made last year, when Republican Commissioner Uyeda was the stand-in chairman. The lawsuit was approved by a commission that then included two Republicans and a Democrat, with no dissenting statements issued. But Konanykhin says the enforcement lawyers got the approval rubber-stamped, arguing that “rejection of a staff recommendation is the exception rather than the rule.”

The policy summit, among the most prominent annual crypto events in Washington, features a code of conduct that calls for “a safe and welcoming environment that fosters open dialogue and the free expression of ideas.” While Konanykhin might want to tell Atkins that his enforcement crew “crudely fabricated absurd charges against Unicoin and its executives,” the legal constraints against him won’t permit that open dialogue.