Munchee Settlement Puts the Utility Token Argument to the Test
Coin Center’s analysis of the recent SEC enforcement action against an ICO found to be in violation of securities law.
The SEC’s settlement with Munchee is an important milestone in the young history of token law, because it begins to challenge the naive version of the utility token argument and...
Congress’s anti-money laundering bill (S. 1241): Coin Center is on it
An update on our work to minimize the confusion that this redundant bill could cause.
The “Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act of 2017,” also known as S. 1241, has been getting a fair amount of attention since we first wrote about it...
Good news: Ethereum’s CryptoKitties are probably not securities.
Ethereum just got overrun with cats; the cats are literally slowing down the network with their feline machinations, their idiosyncratic personalities, and yes, their breeding… lots of cat breeding… on...
Coin Center statement on IRS Coinbase order.
While the court granted a narrowed version of the IRS’s original request for Coinbase customer data, we remain deeply unsatisfied with the lack of justification provided by the IRS. Without...
Video of the Rules Committee meeting is below and you can watch Rep. Jared Polis speak about the bill that he co-sponsored with Rep. David Schweikert. The amendment would have...
We briefed the Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force.
Senator Orrin Hatch, chairman of the taskforce, convened a Blockchain 101 briefing for republican policymakers and their staff. Coin Center executive director Jerry Brito was joined on the panel by...
Coin Center gave a regulatory update at Ethereum Devcon3.
At the Ethereum community’s largest conference, executive director Jerry Brito and director of research Peter Van Valkenburgh took the stage after the project’s lead developers to give the audience an...
CFTC commissioner: tokens that start as securities may “transform” into commodities.
Yesterday I participated in a panel discussion on cryptocurrencies at Georgetown University’s first annual “fintech week,” where the subject of ICOs was unsurprisingly much discussed. One thing that stood out...
Two podcasts that will help you understand the token boom.
Our director of research Peter Van Valkenburgh has been invited on as an expert in two podcasts. These make a good primer on what is hot in the cryptocurrency world....
The CFTC published a new report on cryptocurrencies today
A new primer released today by LabCFTC, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission’s FinTech initiative, is a helpful report that that outlines the agency’s relationship to the virtual currency and blockchain...