Government regulators scored a legal victory last week when a federal judge held that a decentralized cryptocurrency collective was liable for violating commodities exchange rules. The question now is how they will get the collective to pay up.
The ruling by Judge William Orrick of San Francisco was a win for the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Together with another ruling by Orrick from December, it suggests that regulators or private plaintiffs who want to sue so-called decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, have a legal basis for doing so.
What is less clear is how easy it will be to collect on a legal judgment against a DAO, whose members are often anonymous and informally organized.
In his ruling on Thursday, Orrick ordered the DAO sued by the CFTC, Ooki, to pay a $643,542 fine. He also approved the CFTC’s request for an order to take down a website associated with the group and the blockchain-based app it controls, a virtual currency trading protocol.
“I have no idea how they are going to enforce it,” said Arina Shulga, a securities lawyer at the law firm Nelson Mullins.
Source: DeFi Group Found Liable Under Commodities Law, but Getting It to Pay May Be Tricky – WSJ
