Ripple Is a Security and It Isn’t – Bloomberg

More broadly, if you take this decision seriously, it means that the SEC has essentially no jurisdiction over crypto. Most token sales will either be (1) direct to institutional investors or (2) on exchanges. Sales on exchanges, says Judge Torres, are not securities offerings, because the buyer doesn’t know that she is giving money to the issuer. Sales to institutional investors are securities offerings, but anyone selling anything to institutional investors in 2023 can do so under an exemption from securities registration. (Securities registration is only for public sales, not sales to big institutions.) So basically no crypto sales will ever require SEC registration, no crypto exchange or brokerage will be a securities exchange or brokerage, and the SEC is out of crypto entirely.

But I am not sure that it is actually all that good for crypto in the long run. The message of this decision is that crypto companies can freely sell tokens to retail investors as long as those retail investors are uninformed and the companies are secretive about it; only if they sell tokens openly to sophisticated investors will they get in trouble. That’s bad.

Source: Ripple Is a Security and It Isn’t – Bloomberg