The Securities and Exchange Commission is determined to secure a decisive win in its lawsuit against Coinbase, filed in a New York federal court. To do so, it is trying to leverage a recent ruling on a separate case from a court in California, thousands of miles from its current legal battle.

But the regulator’s legal strategy, lawyers told The Block, may not be a winning one. 

“To say that… that there's case law saying crypto assets are securities based on [the insider trading case] is a little aggressive,” Terrence Yang, a lawyer and managing director at Swan Bitcoin, told The Block.

In June, the SEC sued Coinbase, accusing it of breaking federal securities laws by offering unregistered securities in the form of digital tokens. The lawsuit is the latest in a string of complaints …