The Chairman of the Commission on securities and exchange Commission (SEC), the U.S. Jay Clayton refuses to call bitcoin a security, as it replaces a national currency.
Such opinion the head of the SEC has expressed during an interview with CNBC on 6 June to discuss the prospects of the blockchain technology to increase the efficiency of the market.
“Replace the dollar, yen or Euro for bitcoin. This kind of currency can be a valuable paper,” he explained.
Other cryptocurrencies Clayton in his speech did not mention. But he said that he believes securities. It was a token that represents the digital asset.
“When I give you my money and you make them your company… and in exchange for what I gave the money, you say, “I’m going to return them to you”. This is a valuable paper. We handle the issuance of these securities and trade them.”
On specifying question of the journalist whether in this case the initial placement of coins (ICO) securities, Clayton replied in the affirmative. He also added that the SEC would not change the definition of the concept specifically to support people working in the ICO.
Recall that in February, the Clayton highly appreciated the prospects of technologies of the distributed registry, in particular the blockchain, during a working session on crypto-currencies, together with the Commission on commodity futures trading (CFTC). The head of the SEC said that each ICO, to which the Commission had this to face, must be defined as securities.
As for alithinou Ethereum (ETH) and Ripple (XRP), the Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin refuses to accept the cryptocurrency security. The creators of Ripple have taken similar positions. For them, this issue now is particularly acute disgruntled investor filed a lawsuit on them, which interpreterpath selling XRP as the sale of unregistered securities.
