Lawyers for Bittrex, the shuttered U.S. cryptocurrency exchange that paid $24 million to settle a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit in 2023, are asking a federal judge to throw out the agreement and order the agency to return the money, Decrypt reported.

The argument: the SEC has since reversed itself on the very legal theory the case was built on. In a motion to vacate filed Monday, Bittrex’s attorneys urged the court to undo the prior judgment and compel a refund of the penalty before the SEC distributes it elsewhere, according to the report. 

“Two-and-a-half years after extracting a settlement from a bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange premised on the legal theory that the tokens that traded on the exchange were securities, the SEC has (a) conceded that its legal theory was wrong and those tokens were not securities, (b) acknowledged that its enforcement strategy was misguided from the start, and (c) dropped every similar case and investigation except this one,” Bittrex’s lawyers wrote in the filing.

The Seattle-based exchange was sued by the SEC under the Biden administration over allegations that it had offered the sale of crypto tokens that the regulator deemed unregistered securities, Decrypt reported. Bittrex settled for $24 million in 2023, a year after agreeing to pay $29 million to the U.S. Treasury Department over alleged violations of sanctions targeting Iran, Cuba, and Syria.

Shortly after the SEC settlement, Bittrex shut down, saying it was no longer “economically viable” to continue operating in the “current U.S. regulatory and economic environment,” the news outlet said.

Since President Donald Trump’s return to power last year, the SEC has reoriented its approach to digital assets, with agency leadership repeatedly stating that it does not consider the vast majority of crypto tokens to be securities, and has dropped nearly all of the lawsuits it had brought against crypto firms and exchanges, according to the report.