SEC Chair Gary Gensler gave a strange television interview after this enforcement action, minimizing the burden of the US securities registration system. “It’s just a form on our website,” Gensler said, which is surely news to the public companies that spend millions of dollars a year on public-company securities-law compliance. 4 There is a widespread view in the crypto industry that it is basically impossible to register crypto offerings as securities, that the existing US securities laws are not written for crypto projects and the SEC is not flexible about adapting them, so that saying a crypto offering is a security is equivalent to banning it. I am broadly sympathetic to this view — a lot of crypto stuff is decentralized and so hard to fit into traditional securities disclosure — though I kind of think that, in this case, you could find a way to register a centralized crypto staking product? It’s, like, a variable-interest note of a company? You could probably register it? But you’d need the exchange to be a public company and release audited financials?…
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