In a post-FTX environment, several financial regulators are taking action to emphasize a policy of sound custody and disclosure practices and to better understand certain risks to protect customers in the event of an insolvency or similar proceeding. For example, back in January 2023, the New York Department of Financial Services announced that it had
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The Crypto Wars Escalate
The gloves are off. The SEC’s recent enforcement actions against leading crypto exchanges suggest that the SEC has decided that time’s up for the crypto industry as it currently exists in the United States.
After spending years urging industry participants to come in and register, the SEC has made clear, by going after some of the…
Buyer Beware – FCA Publishes Financial Promotion Rules for Cryptoassets
On 8 June 2023, the UK Financial Conduct Authority (“FCA”) published a policy statement (PS23/6) on the financial promotion rules for cryptoassets (the “Policy Statement”). This is accompanied by a guidance consultation (GC23/1), where the FCA is seeking feedback on proposed guidance to the Policy Statement.
Part II: With New DAO Law on the Books, Utah Joins Race with Wyoming and Tennessee to Become U.S. “Crypto Capital”
As discussed in Part I of this series, state DAO LLC laws have been enacted in the last several years and have become one option for decentralized autonomous organizations (or DAOs) to create a so-called “legal wrapper” or real-world corporate entity to shield individual members from liability.
In Part II we will look at some…
Part I: With New DAO Law on the Books, Utah Joins Race with Wyoming and Tennessee to Become U.S. “Crypto Capital”
Little-known legal trivia: In 1977 Wyoming was the first state to pioneer the LLC, which is now a commonly applied legal innovation. Fast forward more than forty years…in July 2021, Wyoming again tried to be at the vanguard of new corporate formations and passed legislation that recognized decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, as legally distinct…
DAO Deemed ‘General Partnership’ in Negligence Suit over Crypto Hack, Prompting Decentralized Orgs to Rethink Corporate Formation
In what appears to be an issue of first impression, a California district court ruled that various defendants allegedly holding governance tokens to the bZx DAO (or “Decentralized Autonomous Organization”), a protocol for tokenized margin trading and lending, could be deemed to be members of a “general partnership” under California law under the facts outlined…
Crypto Contagion – Managing Risk on Multiple Fronts
Crypto firm bankruptcies and resulting disruption in the crypto ecosystem will continue to exacerbate liquidity and regulatory concerns in this space. Since all participants supporting the crypto ecosystem are at risk, managing that risk is critical.
Fund managers should be prepared on multiple fronts.
Read the full post written by our colleagues on The Capital Commitment
CFTC Enforcement Highlights Potential Compliance Risks to Crypto Exchanges for Derivatives Trading
Binance is the latest major crypto industry player to be sued by a U.S. regulator. On March 27, 2023, the CFTC announced that it had filed a civil enforcement action against Binance Holdings Limited (and related legal entities) (collectively, “Binance”), its CEO, Changpeng Zhao (“Zhao”), and its former chief compliance officer, Samuel Lim (“Lim”), for…
Part II: When You Jump Chains, Do NFTs Stay the Same? Ordinals on the Bitcoin Blockchain
As discussed in Part I of this series, Ordinals are a pioneering new method of utilizing the Bitcoin blockchain that will usher in new and innovative use cases on Bitcoin. As promised, in Part II we will discuss the implications for creators and owners.
Implications of Ordinal NFTs for Creators and Owners
As with most…
Part I: When You Jump Chains, Do NFTs Stay the Same? Ordinals on the Bitcoin Blockchain
The NFT community has been humming in 2023 after the recent rise in Bitcoin NFT mints. Ordinals, a non-fungible token (“NFT”) protocol, sent the community buzzing in January 2023 when it launched on the Bitcoin blockchain (as updated by soft forks in the protocol in 2017 and 2021, which among other things, added new features…
