Founder says SEC charges were blatantly false and cruelly fabricated in new Mockumentary
The US is living through a familiar cycle: regulators are recast as political actors, investigations become theatre, and institutions built to be insulated from day-to-day power find themselves dragged into the partisan current. The Justice Department’s criminal investigation into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell, after months of public criticism from President Donald Trump, has become the latest test of that boundary. Critics see it as intimidation dressed up as process, with central bank independence as collateral damage.
It is against this backdrop that Unicoin has returned to the US.
Last year, I wrote about Unicoin’s consideration of Switzerland as SEC pressure mounted, with chief executive Alex Konanykhin arguing that a parallel Swiss entity could operate beyond the regulator’s reach. The facts have moved on. Konanykhin now says the company chose not to retreat. “I sent them a notice that we are going to be with you,” he said of the decision to remain engaged in the US, framing it as a judgement call after Trump’s pledge to make America the capital of crypto.
That shift in posture matters because Unicoin’s dispute with the SEC has never been presented by the company as a narrow technical disagreement. It is framed as a pattern, an example of regulation-by-enforcement, and, in Konanykhin’s view, a campaign waged through pressure tactics. In the interview, he returned to the phrase that also appears in the film: “death by subpoena.”
The catalyst for the renewed push is a short, multi-part, AI-generated mockumentary, A Trillion-Dollar Hit Job, which stitches real news footage with hyper-realistic synthetic scenes to satirise what it calls a “War on Crypto” led by former SEC chair Gary Gensler. It is advocacy, but it is also positioning: Unicoin is attempting to move the argument from technical filings into public narrative.
The film lands at a moment when the SEC itself is in transition. Paul S. Atkins was sworn in as SEC chair in April 2025. In speeches under “Project Crypto”, Atkins has argued that the question of whether a token is an investment contract turns on whether the issuer makes explicit and unambiguous promises of essential managerial efforts, a reading that narrows the perimeter compared with the previous administration’s posture.
Unicoin has leaned into that opening. A December 2025 press release said shareholders approved a move towards a foundation structure that, it argues, shifts the asset towards non-security status under Atkins’ framework, enabling exchange listings as a commodity-like instrument rather than a regulated crypto security. The company’s narrative is clear: the rules are changing, and the enforcement case is now out of step with the political direction of travel.
Konanykhin said the shift to a foundation was not cosmetic, but designed to remove the central feature the SEC typically relies on under the Howey test: the idea that buyers are depending on the managerial efforts of a small, identifiable group. He described the new structure as a Cayman Islands foundation, established so that neither he nor Silvina can be positioned as the essential actors whose work is meant to drive value for holders. In his telling, the governance is intended to sit outside the founders’ direct control, reframing Unicoin as a currency-like instrument rather than a token marketed on the promise that a core team will deliver returns.
The SEC’s case, however, has a longer runway than the film suggests. In December 2024, Fortune reported that the SEC had issued a Wells Notice to Unicoin, citing potential allegations including fraud, deceptive practices and the sale of unregistered securities. By May 2025, the dispute had escalated into a lawsuit, with the complaint alleging false statements, misleading claims about SEC compliance, and inflated valuations.
Konanykhin disputes the substance and the process. In an interview, he argued that the allegations had not been meaningfully particularised. “They have not expanded at all,” he said. “They are throwing around these terms without any concrete evidence.” He described earlier inquiries as exhaustive and outcome-free, and characterised the later charges as a decision taken for reasons beyond the facts.
Konanykhin said the fraud allegations are blatantly false and cruelly fabricated in new Mockumentary. “They are throwing around these terms without any concrete evidence.” He then offered what he described as two plain examples of falsehood. “One charge is that I promised to the investors a nine million per cent return, quite soon,” he said, arguing that the claim is impossible on its face. He added that the complaint also tries to paint Unicoin as concealing the unregistered status of the offering. “This is not registered,” he said, pointing out that the private placement disclosures stated that clearly, and arguing that it cannot credibly be reframed as deception.
What the mockumentary does, in effect, is to formalise that claim into a political analogy. It invites the audience to see the Unicoin case not as a single enforcement action but as an illustration of institutional power being used to punish a sector, chill counterparties, and drain resources. In the interview, Konanykhin made the practical impact point repeatedly: banks and brokers step back; commercial partners become wary; progress slows even before any courtroom outcome.
This is where the Powell parallel becomes more than rhetorical. In Washington, enforcement and investigation now sit closer to the surface of politics than they did a decade ago. The Reuters reporting on the Powell probe describes a Justice Department increasingly perceived as an enforcer of White House priorities, with investigations that appear to follow public targeting. Unicoin’s film is attempting to cast the SEC’s posture under Gensler in the same light: an institution using process as leverage, with the burden itself becoming the punishment.
There is a risk, for Unicoin, in leaning too hard on that framing. Satire can sharpen attention, but it can also blur the discipline of legal argument. Courts do not decide cases on vibe. Even sympathetic observers will still ask the underlying questions raised last year: how to validate asset-backing claims; how to reconcile marketing language with formal disclosures; and how to ensure a structure designed to avoid securities classification is not simply cosmetic.
Yet the company’s calculation is understandable. The US regulatory environment has become as much about signalling as it is about statute. Atkins’ emphasis on “explicit and unambiguous” managerial promises is not just a legal test; it is also a message to markets about what will be prioritised and what will be de-emphasised. In that setting, Unicoin’s insistence that the case can only be reversed by “a political decision” is less a complaint than a diagnosis of how the system now moves.
The unresolved question is whether the new mood in Washington produces clean outcomes, or simply new targets. Unicoin’s return to the US, and its decision to amplify its grievance through an AI-generated mockumentary, is a bet that the pendulum has swung far enough that enforcement pressure can be neutralised by a combination of legal process, structural redesign and public narrative.
In the Powell case, the stakes are institutional: a central bank’s independence and the credibility of the rule-of-law boundary around it. In Unicoin’s case, the stakes are commercial: access to markets, counterparties, and the ability to pursue a listing or exchange trading without the shadow of continuing litigation. The common thread is that both stories now sit inside the same American reality, where law, regulation and politics have become harder to separate, and where the public story is often treated as part of the strategy rather than a by-product of it.
Unicoin is attempting to win on two fronts at once: in court, and in its corporate architecture. The foundation model is not a flourish. It is a direct response to the Howey framework, an effort to distance the asset from the promise, explicit or implied, that buyers are relying on a central team to deliver returns. If that separation is real in governance, disclosures and day-to-day control, the enforcement story becomes harder to prosecute and easier to outgrow. If it is not, the SEC will argue it is form over substance. Either way, the fight has moved from rhetoric to design, and the outcome will turn on a simple question: who is doing the work that holders are being encouraged to rely on.
SEC Lawfare Against Unicoin / Mockumentary – Part ii, SEC Lawfare against Unicoin
