Again - to reiterate VERY positive news, Coinbase has applied for a Securities License, and once they obtain it, they will be adding alts.
It's not clear to me what's the point of their application. Does that mean that they will be able to assess whether a currency should be treated as security or not?
The SEC also mentioned (for the most part) that ETH is safe and good to go.
ETH is good to go as long as it is viewed as a currency alone and not as a security, which is definitely another way to look at Ethereum.
The question is - if they begin hammering down these exchanges in the U.S. that are trading all the alts, will that drag down the BTC and the few others?
I don't think so. There are plenty of exchanges, some of them really big, outside of the U.S.