SEC Chair Gary Gensler:
They don’t just resemble securities, they are securities. Thurgood Marshall, a great Supreme Court Justice, wrote in an opinion – and I think it was in the 1970s – that the Congress painted with a broad brush to protect the public when somebody is raising money from the public and the public anticipates a profit. That’s kind of the core. And yes, the service providers, if you wish, the crypto exchanges, the crypto lending platforms, whether they call them such centralized or decentralized (so-called DeFi), they’re transacting and providing services to the public. And they’re providing those services around some very small handful of non-security tokens, crypto non-security tokens. But the vast number of these thousands of tokens – without prejudging any one of them – meet the standard of being a security, and thus the platforms have an obligation to come in and register, work with us and find a path forward.
Source: SEC’s Gensler Holds Firm That Existing Laws Make Sense for Crypto
