Most days, there is little love lost between the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and the world of crypto. As the regulator of the world’s largest capital market, the commission’s continuing work to track down sales for tokens it considers unregistered securities has left a fair bit of the crypto market viewing the commission like a boogeyman. Which is not fair. There are controversial cases, but the ICO boom was rampant with predation, fraud and theft: Exactly the sort of issues you keep a regulator around to stamp out. Right now, though, the SEC is faced with a wide …

Every Friday, Law Decoded delivers analysis on the week’s critical stories in the realms of policy, regulation and law. Editor’s note DeFi has stolen the show lately. Spectacular rises and falls of unaudited tokens named after meme-able foods changing hands via ascendant liquidity pools have left many of us unimaginative observers mostly blinking. In this area, I can offer no particularly hot takes beyond the line that keeps coming to me: “This does not end well.” Chalk it up to some midwestern assumption that money you make too quickly is never truly yours. But the situation with DeFi and yield …

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, publicized legal action against another 2017 Initial Coin Offering, or ICO. Boon.Tech and Rajesh Pavithran, the project's CEO, face fraud accusations from the commission, as well charges associated with securities registration, an Aug. 13 statement from the SEC detailed. The statement added: "According to the SEC’s order, from November 2017 to January 2018, Boon.Tech and Pavithran raised approximately $5 million by selling Boon Coins to more than 1,500 investors in the U.S. and worldwide to raise funding to develop and market a platform to connect employers posting jobs with freelancers seeking work." …

Cardano (ADA) founder Charles Hoskinson recently offered to help the troubled Ethereum Classic (ETC) community, but it came with a major condition. The community would first have to institute a decentralized treasury system, similar to Hoskinson’s Cardano and many other blockchain projects. If the community did not accept his terms, Hoskinson felt like his help would have been a waste of time and money: “It's not worth my company's time or our strategies to pivot for a grant or a one off payment to go and bail us out. If there is a treasury system, it means that I can …

Adam Back recently took to Twitter with controversial comments on many of the industry’s largest crypto projects — including Ethereum (ETH), Cardano (ADA), Ripple (XRP), and Stellar (XML). His tweets placed these projects in the same category as a number of bonafide scams, which he considers to have been orchestrated as “premines”. We interviewed Back in order to clarify his position on the matter, starting with questions of how he feels about Satoshi Nakamoto essentially premining over one million Bitcoin. Back responded that “Bitcoin has no premine”, adding that he considers Patoshi research to be “highly speculative”. However, he agreed …

Plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against Status and its 2017 initial coin offering of the Status Network Token (SNT) are asking the judge to authorize official document delivery, or serving, via alternative channels like Twitter and emails. In court documents obtained by Cointelegraph and filed on Aug. 3, the judge is presented with a ready-to-sign motion outlining alternative methods for class-action plaintiffs to serve case files to Jarrad Hope and Carl Bennetts, both co-founders of Status. Social media for sending the law Specifically, the motion would allow the plaintiffs to contact the co-founders via their Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, personal …

The boom of the initial coin offerings defined the blockchain industry in 2017 and the first half of 2018 as capital flowed to finance many new projects and the associated services. Ahead of Ethereum’s five year anniversary, Cointelegraph interviewed Kosala Hemachandra, the founder of MyEtherWallet. As he revealed, the surge in activity in 2017 turned the one-man operation — started 10 days after Ethereum’s launch — into a serious software company. MyEtherWallet was at the time among the most popular and user-friendly wallets, and it had complete support for ERC-20 tokens — vital for engaging with ICOs. The most well-known …

Three Canadian citizens involved with an alleged initial coin offering scam from crypto project PlexCorps have been charged with fraud over conning investors out of $8 million. According to a July 24 statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Ohio, PlexCorps owners Dominic Lacroix and Sabrina Paradis-Royer as well as former employee Yan Ouellet were indicted on five charges, including conspiracy to commit securities fraud and wire fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The three were found to be responsible for transferring millions in investor funds obtained through an initial coin offering (ICO) …

Persistent rumors on Polkadot channels and groups and a series of forms and NDAs to “build with Polkadot” suggest that the project may soon run a new token sale for its token, the DOT. The purported dashboard of the upcoming sale is located at get.polkadot.network. The page appears to return an error as of press time, but screenshots obtained by Cointelegraph suggest that the sale has already begun as community members reported successfully purchasing the token. Prospective “builders” can sign up to build via a “Get Started” page by providing their email. They will then receive a form to fill …

Reggie Middleton, the chief executive of crypto company Veritaseum, is suing telecommunications provider T-Mobile for allegedly enabling the theft of $8.7 million worth of crypto in a series of SIM-swap attacks. According to filings published on July 22, Middleton was first targeted by SIM-swappers during July 2017. Despite immediately reporting the incident to T-Mobile, Middleton claims to have been the victim of four successful SIM-swaps over the rest of 2017, and further attacks during 2018 and 2019. The suit accuses T-Mobile of having “abjectly failed” in its responsibility to protect the personal and financial information of its customers. What is …

The Avalanche project, a blockchain protocol founded by Cornell’s Emin Gün Sirer, has completed a $42 million public token sale after raising $12 million in a private sale in June. Avalanche blockchain developer AVA Labs said that the Avalanche network launch is expected to come by the end of August. Public sale offered a total of 72 million AVAX tokens The $42 million public sale took place on July 15, taking just a few hours to complete. Starting at 10:00 a.m. ET, the token sale offered up to 72 million AVAX tokens. At 2:33 p.m. ET, just four hours and …

In her July 21 speech for Blockchain Week Singapore, Securities and Exchange Commissioner Hester Peirce, known among the industry as ‘CryptoMom,’ spoke out on her opposition to the SEC’s recently concluded suit against Telegram. SEC action against Telegram served neither investors nor mission Peirce’s speech, entitled “Not Braking and Breaking,” emphasized the roles and responsibilities of regulators regarding innovation, particularly in the light of the case against Telegram that came to an end in June. Telegram had sold $1.7 billion in contracts for GRAM tokens, which would be the native token of the Telegram Open Network. As preface, the commissioner …