The head of the Commission on securities and exchange Commission (SEC) , Jay Clayton (Jay Clayton) in a speech on the results of the work of the Ministry in 2018 and plans for next year highlighted that the ICO sees “an effective way of raising funds for entrepreneurs and other individuals”, but it does not change the fundamental position the adherence to the law in matters relating to the proposals to investors of securities.
Clayton reminded that for those who want to raise capital in innovative ways that open doors created by SEC in October, a Strategic hub of innovation and financial technologies (FinHub), and operated centrally to improve coordination in the field of technology application in the distributed registry of digital assets and ICO.
In the past year, according to Clayton, the employees of the SEC spent a lot of time working in these areas, and in 2019, this trend will continue. The Agency will have to understand the number of issues relating to the ICO, for example, to resolve doubts in insufficient – compared with the traditional markets securities and debt instruments, the protection of investors, which gives great opportunities for fraud and manipulation.
We will remind, in the report previously submitted to the SEC for fiscal year 2018 says that since the creation of the office of kiberprestuplenie (Cyber Unit) in September last year, it is increasing its attention to the sphere of scams in the cryptocurrency sector, closed a few dozen ICO and start over 255 of the investigations, “by sending hands-free messages in addition to the cryptocurrency market and far beyond it”. Three of the discovered illicit ICO has resulted in losses to investors totaling $68 million And the size of fines issued SEC] Avil $3.94 billion
Recently the SEC fined the company CoinAlpha Advisors LLC (CoinAlpha) $50 thousand for offer to investors in unregistered securities and has forced startups Airfox and Paragon to register tokens as securities, to pay a fine of $250 thousand, and to return funds to injured investors. However, the Commission failed to prove in court that the token-ICO-project Blockvest are securities.
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