[It] has a shot at becoming one of the core layers on which most financial and informational transfers happen between applications in a natively Web3 world, Bankman-Fried once told Fortune.

The FTX founder, whos now facing criminal charges for fraud, lauded Solana so much that Alameda Research, his crypto hedge fund, had more than $1 billion in Solanas native cryptocurrency on its balance sheet right before it and FTX suddenly collapsed in November.

In the days after Bankman-Frieds crypto empire crumbled, the total market capitalization of SOL, Solanas token, plummetedfrom above $13 billion to about $5 billion, according to CoinMarketCap. But it quickly rebounded, and Gokal, the Solana cofounder, told Fortune in May that the FTX meltdown was in the rearview mirror as SOLs market cap rose back to about $8 billion.

Now, Solana is facing a new threat. On Monday and Tuesday of last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission claimed that SOL and at least 12 other tokens are unregistered securities in lawsuits against Binance, the worlds largest cryptocurrency exchange, and Coinbase, the U.S.s largest. After the lawsuits were filed, SEC Chair Gary Gensler said the crypto industry was populated with hucksters, fraudsters, scam artists, and Ponzi schemes.

Since then, the price of SOL dropped from about $22 to about $15nearly 30% as of Monday evening. Its market cap, the second largest among tokens deemed securities by the SEC, has dropped from near $8.5 billion to about $6 billion. And Robinhood, a stock-trading app that also lets users buy and sell cryptocurrencies, said it will delist it from its platform come the end of June.

Solana weathered the fall of Bankman-Fried, but, despite developers continued belief in the blockchain, the pall of future litigation hangs over the cryptocurrency.

Its a black mark on their forehead, Arthur Jakoby, a former SEC prosecutor who now co-chairs the securities litigation and enforcement team at Herrick, Feinstein LLP, told Fortune. And, he added, its potentially an existential threat for the Solana ecosystem.

Is SOL a security?

The core of the SECs lawsuits boils down to the following: U.S. securities exchanges need to register with the SEC, and because Binance and Coinbase failed to register, they broke the law.

To make its case, the agency needs to first prove that both companies effectively operated as securities exchanges, which is why its arguing in both lawsuits that SOL and more than 12 other tokens, including Polygons MATIC and Cardanos ADA, are unregistered securities. Both exchanges listed SOL.

The Solana Foundation, the legal entity that Yakavenko and Gokal founded to promote the cryptocurrency, strenuously disagrees with the SEC. After remaining quiet for days after both suits were filed, it responded to the SECs allegations.

The Solana Foundation strongly believes that SOL is not a security, a spokesperson said in a statement to Fortune. We welcome the continued engagement of policymakers as constructive partners on regulation to achieve legal clarity on these issues for the thousands of entrepreneurs across the U.S. building in the digital assets space.

The Solana Foundation disagrees with the characterization of SOL as a security. We welcome the continued engagement of policymakers as constructive partners on regulation to achieve legal clarity on these issues for the thousands of entrepreneurs across the U.S. building in the

Solana Foundation (@SolanaFndn) June 10, 2023

The SECs allegations have not translated to a direct legal threat for Solana since the agency has only sued Binance and Coinbase, not the Solana Foundation, its founders, or its promoters. Legal experts, however, say that the threat for Solana and other singled-out cryptocurrencies is unequivocally heightened.

I would be very surprised if we didn't see some actions in the near future against individual companies and/or their founders, David Rosenfeld, an associate law professor at Northern Illinois University and former SEC prosecutor, wrote in an email to Fortune. Crypto is a big priority for the SEC right now.

Rosenfeld said that its impossible to predict what litigation the agency will bring, but he suspects that the SEC chose the tokens it can best prove are securities. That doesn't necessarily mean that the SEC will be pursuing these companies individually, but it does indicate that the agency thinks the case against them would be compelling, he said.

Specifically, he mentioned that Solana Labs, another entity created by Yakovenko and Gokal, filed multiple reports with the agency from 2018 through 2020 to argue that SOL was exempt from registration, which, Rosenfeld told Fortune, is something that could be seen as a concession that they are securities.

Solana Labs did not release tokens publicly, as a deluge of companies did during the ICO craze of 2016, but rather sold them to venture capitalists to raise funds. It drummed up almost $340 million from private sales, according to the SECs Binance and Coinbase complaints. This private sale of SOL is a potential legal escape clause, Bloombergs Matt Levine described last week.

If you look at the underlying technology and what SOL does...I think it's a utility. It is not a security at all, a cofounder of a prominent blockchain company, who declined to be named, told Fortune.

However, he added: In terms of how it was promoted, I think the Solana Foundation and FTX treated it just like it was a security.

Yesha Yadav, a law professor at Vanderbilt University who specializes in securities and cryptocurrency regulation, similarly told Fortune that the case against Solana isnt simple. There are some definite complexities here, she said, pointing out, for example, how developers pay with SOL to use the blockchains computing power. 

Moreover, while SEC has recently expanded its recent crypto litigation strategy to target exchanges, that doesn't mean it will abandon enforcement actions against individual tokens, Jakoby, the former SEC prosecutor at Herrick, told Fortune. Its hard to imagine, Yadav added, that if the SEC is serious about this, they're not going to potentially bring a case against some of the very prominent coins that are listed.

Continue to build

While legal experts emphasized the potentially existential risks of the lawsuits for the singled-out cryptocurrencies, many Solana community members were comparatively optimistic.

The day after the SEC sued Coinbase, they flocked to New York City for one of Solanas Hacker Houses, a frequent event the foundation hosts for developers, artists, and investors.

Ben WeissFortune

For us and for the devs that we know, none of us are lawyers, so we're still going to continue to build on cool tech, the founder of payments app Sphere, which builds on Solana and other blockchains, told Fortune. (He declined to give his full name, citing the regulatory uncertainty.)

Aidan Neil, the cofounder of Ladder Labs, which has built a Solana-based video game as well as referral system, had a similarly blasé reaction once the lawsuits became public. We didn't budge for a second, he told Fortune at the Hacker House. Truthfully, we've been through so much that it was like, Oh, great, here we go again.

And venture capitalists were also undeterred. I guess we are gratified to see Solana again on the national stage, an investor in Solana, who declined to give his full name out of regulatory concerns, told Fortune. Solana was an extraordinarily compliant fundraise from the beginning.

But, despite investor and developer insistence on the lawsuits non-impact, potential discord from the litigation has breached the Solana community. Days after the SEC sued Binance and Coinbase, some broached the idea of forking, or irrevocably updating, Solana to erase the tokens that FTX and Alameda continue to have on its balance sheet. No plans for a fork are imminent.

Do not fork Solana

1) The SOL belongs to creditors, not FTX

2) Shared state is the product of social consensus, which is incredibly valuable and the product of agreement from millions of users. Incredibly powerful. Break it at your own risk

3) Dangerous precedent

Keone (@keoneHD) June 11, 2023

At the NYC Hacker House, talk of whether SOL was or wasnt a security was noticeably absentuntil Amira Valliani, the Solana Foundations head of policy, broke the silence during a panel titled WTF is going on in crypto policy.

Nearly 10 minutes into a discussion on the broader crypto regulatory context in Washington, D.C., Valliani, under the purple lights of a popular NYC concert venue, decided to address the elephant in the room.

SOL is not a security, she said. There was a smattering of applause among the crowd of developers, artists, and investors. Discussion quickly returned to the state of potential crypto legislation in Congress. Once the approximately 30-minute panel ended, Valliani asked the panelists to provide parting words to the audience.

Keep building, said one. Said another: Dont panic.

Banks issued roughly 680,000 reports of check fraud to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, also known as FinCEN, last year. Thats up from 350,000 reports in 2021. Meanwhile the U.S. Postal Inspection Service reported roughly 300,000 complaints of mail theft in 2021, more than double the prior years total.

Early in the pandemic, government relief checks became an attractive target for criminals. The problem has only gotten worse and postal authorities and bank officials are warning Americans to avoid mailing checks if possible, or at least to use a secure mail drop such as inside the post office. Meanwhile, as the cases of fraud increase, victims are waiting longer to recover their stolen money.

Check usage has been in decline for decades as Americans have largely switched to paying for their services with credit and debit cards. Americans wrote roughly 3.4 billion checks in 2022, down from nearly 19 billion checks in 1990, according to the Federal Reserve. However, the average size of the checks Americans write rose from $673 in 1990 or $1,602 in todays dollars to $2,652 last year.

Despite the declining use of checks in the United States, criminals have been increasingly targeting the U.S. Mail since the COVID-19 pandemic to commit check fraud, FinCEN wrote in an alert sent out in February.

Checks are still frequently used by small businesses. Eric Fischgrund, who runs FischTank PR, a 30-person public relations firm in New York, had about 15 checks that were being mailed to him from clients stolen after they all went through the same Postal Service distribution center. Ten of them were successfully cashed by criminals.

The checks were stolen in March and Fischgrund became aware of the problem in April, when several of his clients who were never late missed payments. The Postal Service investigated and Fischgrund has recovered about 70% of the revenue, but some of the cases havent yet been resolved.

According to the investigator on the case, the perpetrators used technology that melted ink in the to field of the checks so they could write in fake names. FischTank instructed all its clients to change their paper format because it was dealing with a check fraud issue.

Fischgrund said hed never previously had an issue with check fraud in the nearly 10 years he has run his own business. Now he has a clause in invoices and new client contracts that asks for electronic payments only.

I dont think well ever go back to asking for checks as an option, he said.

Todays check fraud criminals are not small operations, or lone individuals like the Leonardo DiCaprio character in the 2002 movie Catch Me If You Can, counterfeiting checks from his hotel room and apartment. They are sophisticated criminal operations, with participants infiltrating post office distribution centers, setting up fake businesses or creating fake IDs to deposit the checks. Walkers, or people who actually walk in to cash these checks, receive training in how to appear even more legitimate.

In one case in Southern California last year, nearly sixty people were arrested on charges of committing more than $5 million in check fraud against 750 people.

Criminals are getting the checks or identification information by fishing mail out of U.S. postal boxes, looking for envelopes that appear to be either bill payments or checks being mailed.

The most common type of check fraud is whats known as check washing, where a criminal steals the check from the mail and proceeds to change the payees name on the check and, additionally, the amount of money.

Some criminals are going further and using the information found on a check to gather sensitive personal data on a potential victim. There have been reports of criminals creating fake entities out of personal data obtained from a check, or even opening new lines of credit or businesses with that data as well. This allows fraudsters to create new checks using old account data.

Thats why check fraud experts are saying Americans should avoid sending checks in the mail or at least take additional safety steps to avoid becoming a victim.

If you need to mail a check, do not put a check in your residential mailbox and raise the flag to notify the postman. Drop off checks inside a post office if you have to, said Todd Robertson with Argo Data, a financial data provider.

Banks, keenly aware of the problem, are increasingly watching for signs of fraud at branches and through mobile check deposit services, including large check deposits. Theyre training branch employees to take steps such as looking at check numbers, because checks are typically written in order, or noticing when a check is being written for a much larger amount than the customers previous history would indicate. Banks also now deploy software at their branches that can tell how risky a check might be.

But those systems become moot if criminals are able to persuade tellers often at the front lines for check acceptance to look past any red flags.

These fraudsters are much more aggressive than they were in the past, and they are pressuring tellers to override internal systems that might flag a potentially suspicious transaction, Paul Brenda, a senior vice president at the American Bankers Association.

Banks generally reimburse customers if they are victims of check fraud within days. However, due to the growing number of fraud cases, refunds have slowed down in recent months. In March, a trio of Democratic Senators asked the banking industry to be more prompt in reimbursing victims of check fraud whenever possible.

Another safety tip for businesses is to opt in to a banks positive pay services with a business checking account. Positive pay means you pre-authorize checks for a certain amount as well as the check number, cutting down criminals ability to wash the check and withdraw money for an amount that isnt pre-authorized.

In a post-pandemic world, office jargon is increasingly met with confusion and in some cases offensewith experts warning phrases like boiling the ocean just make communication more difficult.

It comes as a new report from LinkedIn and Duolingo identified not only the most confusing, but also the most overused, phrases in U.S. offices.

The study, which spoke to people aged 18 through to 76, also identified the phrases which are no longer acceptable in a professional environment.

And bad news if youre a fan of the phrase boiling the ocean (meaning undertaking an impossible task) it was the phrase which the majority of respondents found most confusing.

Other baffling phrases included herding cats (a difficult task, particularly in terms of organization), ducks in a row (planning), move the needle (having an effect that people notice) and run it up the flagpole (testing the popularity of a proposal).

Also in the list of the top 10 most confusing phrases were drinking the Kool-Aid (demonstrating obedience), out of pocket (unavailable or unreachable), building the plane while flying it (engaging in a project before its thought out fully), throwing spaghetti at the wall (making a number of attempts to see what will be a success) and juice worth the squeeze (an effort justified by the outcome).

The problem with phrases like this is it actually makes it harder to communicate clearly between teams and geographies, said Chris Preston, founder of U.K.-based company culture experts The Culture Builders.

He outlined that there are three levels of jargon: globalphrases which is understood by a person who speaks a language; nationalsomething only people of a certain nationality would understand; or localsomething only people in a certain team or location would understand.

Jargon creates an in-group and an out-group, Preston said in a call with Fortune. People often use these phrases because they think it sounds clever or have heard someone else say it, and thought they sounded clever.

Often its aspirational, whereas if you actually listen to the best speakers and leaders they use stories and metaphors to get their point across, not jargon.

Jargon damages productivity

Of the 8,000 working professionals across eight countries surveyed by the study, 57% said jargon wastes their time multiple times every month.

The evidence also backs up Prestons theory, with 49% of respondents saying that at least once a week a colleague uses a phrase which sounds like a foreign language.

If Im using loads of jargon and the person Im speaking to doesnt understand, thats on me, Preston said. Its not the listeners job to try and interpret what youre saying. You should be thinking about how to lift the level of engagement.

With Gen Z entering the workforce in a more hybrid and online capacity, jargon can also perpetuate generational divides that arent really an issue until groups are being created.

Such tensions could come from jargon now considered outdated, with LinkedIn and Duolingos report highlighting a number of phrases which are no longer condoned in a corporate setting.

In the U.S. these include bottom of the totem pole (something that is unimportant), blacklist (to ban), or the peanut gallery (a source of insignificant criticism).

Duolingos Senior Learning and Curriculum Manager, Dr Hope Wilson, told Fortune that by some employees using phrases which are no longer accepted it can create fracture in the shared corporate identity.

She added: The employees that use this jargon will feel an affinity for one another that others dont share. And if the jargon is outright offensive, like some terms are, this fracture will be all the stronger.

Unfortunately, these sorts of fractures are hard to address without conscious effort. People are generally quite bad at analyzing our own language use, and so the roots of these divisions can be hard to identify unless someone is explicitly analyzing and addressing the way language is used in the workplace.

It makes you sound desperate

Jargon might not only waste your colleagues time but could also impact your professional goals, warned LinkedIn career expert Catherine Fisher.

Being able to talk the talk is an advantage for workers who get the jargon, but unfairly excludes and leaves behind those who arent as savvy with these terms, she explained to Fortune. You shouldnt have to solve linguistic riddles just to get your work done and find growth opportunities.

This disproportionately affects those who may not have English as their first language. Professionals from non-English speaking households or backgroundsincluding two-thirds of Latino workers (64%) and those fluent in English as a second language (67% FESL)feel like they face a greater disadvantage when jargon is used.

Dr Wilson added that the use of jargon can harm a persons sense of belonging.

She explained: When you dont understand what a colleague is saying, you feel embarrassed and sometimes even like an imposterand its even worse when youre the only person in a whole room who doesnt understand whats going on, and everyone else is nodding along.

Additionally, its worth noting that heavy use of jargon isnt a great thing even when you know the other people in the room understand what youre saying. Jargon is a tool for projecting a workplace identity. So what does it say if every other word out of your mouth is a piece of jargon? It can make you sound desperate to belong.