That’s excellent news for investors protection but probably not so good news for crypto-issuers aiming at ICOs. According to a Bloomberg report, the US SEC gave a strong warning Wednesday that U.S. scrutiny of initial coin offerings is just getting started.
The SEC’s Chairman Jay Clayton said companies raising money through ICOs shouldn’t have any illusions that the government will treat them differently than firms participating in traditional stock offerings. He pointed out that the crypto-space needs close attention because the SEC has already seen examples of fraudsters fleeing the country after persuading U.S. investors to back their ICO.
“I am not going to change the way we approach the offering and trading of securities as a result of the fact that you put it in the form of a token,” Clayton said at the Sandler O’Neill Global Exchange and Brokerage Conference. “I’m protecting the integrity of the market. The behavior we see in this is pretty bad. We’ve got guys with bags of cash headed to the border. That’s not our securities market.”
ICO projects have already raised more than US$9 billion in 2018, surpassing last year’s record of less than US$4 billion, according to ICO data tracker CoinSchedule. Unfortunately, a large chunk of this financial cake has been taken by crypto-scammers across all jurisdictions. And it’s not only ICO’s we should be worried about when it comes to investors protection. Crypto-MLM’s are probably even worse but less public.
