Money service businesses received a reprieve last week that will make cryptocurrency firms very happy since they will be able to more easily expand across the United States. The Conference of State Bank Supervisors (“CSBS”) – 48 state regulators – agreed on a regulatory system for money services’ businesses, including a single set of supervisory
Recently, the United States District Court of the District of Columbia refused to dismiss money laundering charges against a defendant who was allegedly engaged in a darknet cryptocurrency scheme. See U.S. v. Harmon, Case Number 1:19-cr-00395-BAH (D.D.C. July 24, 2020) .
Essentially, the defendant tried to claim that, when he transferred more than 350,000
In an unexpected to say the least case of first impression, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, essentially, blew away the privacy doors of the cryptocurrency world when it forced a Bitcoin exchange to disclose user data to the federal government without being served a warrant. See USA v. Gratkowski,
Fox Partner Kristen Howell was, recently, quoted in a Law360 article on security tokens following the ICO collapse. https://www.law360.com/assetmanagement/articles/1162154/-security-tokens-slow-to-take-off-following-ico-collapse?nl_pk=5882ca7d-b76e-42a1-a1fe-eb96fcbcf60f&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=assetmanagement.
Way back in 2017, the SEC obtained an emergency asset freeze against an internet-based ICO involving certain Canadian residents, who had raised over $15 million on a variety of social media sites through an alleged fraudulent scheme. http://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2017/comp-pr2017-219.pdf.
At the time, it made major news and helped launch the SEC’s Cybersecurity Unit. Of course, there
Just this week, a United States District Judge for the Eastern District of New York told a defendant in a criminal case that he was out luck with the claim there was no securities fraud because he was selling digital tokens. See United States v. Zaslavskiy, Case Number 1:17-cr-00647 (E.D.N.Y.).
The defendant tried to
Recently, the SEC’s Director of Corporation Finance provided long overdue insight on cryptocurrencies. In particular, he indicated that Bitcoins, Etherium, and other such coins functioning on certain decentralized platforms are not securities. Our partner, Kristen Howell, authored a fascinating and informative alert on this topic. See https://www.foxrothschild.com/publications/sec-bitcoin-is-not-governed-by-securities-laws/. We commend it to anyone interested in this