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The crypto sector drove much of the gains. More than one-quarter of the total came from digital asset enforcement. Unregistered initial coin offerings alone accounted for $1.26 billion of the sum.

The Telegram case towers above all others. The SEC initiated its lawsuit against the cloud-based messaging service during Q3 2019. The agency alleged that Telegram had raised capital by distributing almost 3 billion tokens to 171 initial purchasers. Eight months of litigation followed. On June 26, a court approved the settlement terms. Telegram Group agreed to repay $1.2 billion to affected parties and pay $18.5 million as a civil penalty. That combined figure of $1.2185 billion represented 26 percent of the SEC's total 2020 enforcement haul.

Kik's case marked the second major victory. The SEC filed against Kik in June 2019 for conducting an unregistered initial coin offering in 2017. Securities laws required the company to register before selling the tokens. A judge issued the final ruling in October 2020: Kik owed a $5 million fine.

Beyond these headline cases, the SEC notched five more enforcement wins in crypto. Boon Tech, Bitclave, Bitcoiin2Gen, Shopin, and Unikrn settlements combined yielded about $40 million. The NAC Foundation case remained unresolved as of late 2020. The Foundation petitioned the San Francisco Superior Court to dismiss the lawsuit, contending that the SEC had provided false or misleading information to the court.