Podcast: Is Cryptocurrency a Security (like an orange grove)?
Episode 286 -- Matt Stankiewicz on the Ripple Decision and Celsius CEO Indictment
From Station Wagon to Lamborghini: One CypherPunk’s Journey from Cryptoanarchy to Solana Cross-Chain NFT Innovations
Wax Studios
Summer Enforcement Action Review; Raising Money in a Pandemic - Investment Management Roundtable Discussion
Theoretical No More: Blockchain Technology, Cryptocurrencies and the Tax, Legal and Business Implications
Crypto Firms Announce New Products in Payments, Investments, Custody - A major U.S. digital asset management company recently announced the creation and public launch of its MakerDAO Trust, which “offers investors the...more
Crypto Offerings Launch by Major Investment Bank, Asset Manager and Insurer - According to a recent report, a major multinational investment bank and financial services firm is now allowing its investment advisors to pitch...more
AI Protocols Merge, VC Crypto Funding Increases, Tether Completes SOC 2 Audit - According to a recent press release, “SingularityNET (SNET), the world’s first decentralized Artificial Intelligence (AI) network, Fetch.ai, a...more
The world of cryptocurrencies on blockchains and the world of traditional assets in markets have often stood in stark contrast to one another since Bitcoin’s creation in 2008. The lack of a reliable bridge between these two...more
On September 7, 2023, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced the settlement of three separate enforcement actions in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space: namely, concerning the Opyn protocol and its...more
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (“NIST”), a non-regulatory governmental agency that focuses upon the technological aspects of a wide variety of products and services, mostly non-financial in nature,...more
A federal court’s dismissal of claims against a decentralized cryptocurrency platform and its investors for the actions of scam token issuers is a case of first impression with wider significance. On August 29, 2023, the...more
Federal District Court Enters Default Judgment Based on NFT Service of Process - A federal district court judge in Florida entered a $2.2 million default judgment against a defendant on whom the judge previously authorized...more
Payments Firms Launch Crypto Products, New DeFi Price Indices Announced - A U.S. fintech company recently announced the launch of a fiat-to-crypto on-ramp, which facilitates fiat-to-crypto payments using “a customizable...more
On September 22, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (“CFTC”) asserted its jurisdiction over a decentralized autonomous organization (“DAO”) and its founders, signaling for the industry that even an unincorporated...more
Takeaways - ..U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC, or Commission) Chair Gary Gensler reaffirmed his view that the “vast majority” of cryptocurrency tokens are securities, and recent agency enforcement actions...more
In this episode of Crypto Innovators, co-hosts Eric Swartz, senior counsel and Vice Chair of Lowenstein Crypto, and Leah Satlin, counsel in Lowenstein’s Tech Group, talk to self-described CypherPunk Zach Silva, head of...more
Seven years ago, Ethereum launched and became the predominant blockchain for developers to build decentralized applications powered by smart contracts (dApps). By leveraging Ethereum's smart-contract compatibility, developers...more
Roadmap - As a starting point it is helpful to outline a roadmap of how a new blockchain based project might develop. It is important to stress that no two projects will ever have the same objectives. As such, there is no...more
In the generally opaque emerging world of “DAOs”, a rare public dispute recently played out between the Web3 investment group Yield Guild Games (“YGG”) and Merit Circle DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization, or “DAO”,...more
On May 3, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that it was nearly doubling the size of the Enforcement Division’s Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit in order to pursue cases involving crypto asset offerings,...more
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced yesterday that it would hire 20 additional positions to the Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit (formerly known as the Cyber Unit) within the Division of Enforcement, increasing...more
Web3 is a term with a shifting, amorphous definition. In its current form, Web3 encompasses both decentralized platforms and the metaverse. Decentralized platforms offer services and assets that use distributed ledger...more
The Metaverse is an immersive world combining virtual reality and augmented reality, where users are represented by avatars and roam virtual spaces. It comprises a variety of platforms and environments that can be explored,...more
The SEC’s push to regulate the next generation of blockchain-based applications will likely give rise to disputes and enforcement actions, particularly in the developing decentralized finance (DeFi) space....more
The SEC’s reliance on a nebulous US Supreme Court decision raises important questions for the future of decentralized finance. Reves v. Ernst & Young,[1] a 30-year-old US Supreme Court decision on farmers’ co-ops, is...more
Thoughts on Recent SEC statements and Action on Enforcement Related to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAO) - On November 10, 2021 the US Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC) announced that it had halted...more
On November 10, 2021, the SEC announced that it had instituted proceedings against a Wyoming-based decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) to halt its registration of two digital tokens, alleging that disclosure in the...more
As the global digital asset industry continues to grow, regulators worldwide have increased efforts to define and shape the legal landscape through various approaches. In the UAE, for example, the Financial Services...more
Background: Crypto Catch 22 - Followers of the SEC’s efforts to regulate digital tokens will recall former SEC Corp Fin Director William Hinman’s speech at the June 14, 2018 Yahoo Finance Conference in which he introduced...more