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