MATT LEVINE: Securities watchdog halts silly initial coin offering, and leaves us none the wiser
The securities watchdog's move against PlexCoin was good entertainment, but didn’t tell us much about where it stands on cryptocurrencies, writes Matt Levine
Last year some Ethereum developers raised money from investors for a thing called the Decentralized Autonomous Organization, which was meant to pool the investors’ money and invest it in some Ethereum-projects-to-be-named-later under a complicated governance structure. It was all very blockchainy and 2016, and it raised its money — more than $150m worth of ether at the time — without doing anything to comply with US (or anywhere else’s) securities laws. This was totally illegal! But that was the least of the DAO’s problems. It also got hacked and had its money stolen and led to a fork of the Ethereum blockchain and was generally a pretty deep soul-searching moment for the cryptocurrency community. It was also a soul-searching moment for the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which eventually — this July, over a year after the DAO’s brief moment in the sun — released a report noting that the DAO was totally illegal but that it wasn’t going to do anything about it: “In ligh...
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