SEC: already completed ICOs can be withdrawn from under securities law

Cryptocurrency tokens that have already held initial coin placements (ICO) in previous years can be removed from the laws of the United States. This assumption was made by William Hinman, director of corporate finance at the SEC, reports CoinDesk .

“Digital assets can be a tool that will not need such regulation, ” said Hinman at the FinTech Forum in Washington on Friday.

In June, William Hinman already stated that Ethereum, due to its decentralized nature, does not contain the properties inherent in securities, and later SEC head Jay Clayton agreed with this opinion.

In his speech at the FinTech Forum, he did not mention Ethereum, but turned to other cases, such as, for example, the startup TurnKey Jets. Earlier, SEC published a letter of non-action , in which TurnKey recommended refusing legal prosecution if the startup complied with a number of requirements and, as noted by Hinman, at that time the project already had a sufficient token in terms of its functional application.

Moreover, according to him, the SEC can issue similar letters to projects that have not yet had time to fully complete work on their products:

“If they need concessions in the secondary market for their tokens, it cannot be ruled out that they will also be able to receive a letter of no action,” said Hinman.

Regarding the same TurnKey Jets project, Hinman considered a hypothetical situation in which a startup with a similar model would have released its token three years earlier, without having a finished product. According to him, such a token could be recognized as a security, but if the startup had turned to the SEC after the product had been finalized, the regulator could probably go to meet it.

Earlier this year, SEC's senior digital asset adviser, Valerie Schepanik, said that the rules of the securities legislation could apply to some types of steklokoinov.

At the same time, in April , a bill was passed in the US Congress, which contains amendments to the Securities Act (1933) and the Securities Trading Act (1934), allowing for the exclusion of digital tokens from the definition of securities.

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