On 7 September 2023, the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority (“FCA”) set expectations ahead of its new financial promotion rules for cryptoassets (which we wrote about here).
From 8 October 2023, new rules for the marketing of cryptoassets come into force. The new requirements include the need for marketing materials to be “clear, fair…
In its February 2023 discussion paper (DP23/2) relating to the UK regulatory regime for asset management, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (“FCA”) briefly touched on fund tokenisation as an area of technological drive and change in the fund management industry. Please refer here to our update on that discussion paper.
The FCA made clear that…
On July 12, 2023, U.S. Senators Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) proposed a revised version of their previously introduced crypto regulation bill to create better safeguards for the crypto industry generally while adding new, stronger consumer protection provisions and AML provisions. The Lummis-Gillibrand bill, also known as the Responsible Financial Innovation Act (“RFIA”),…
It is not unusual for users of a platform or of software to challenge the enforceability of a company’s terms of use if they take issue with the company’s product or service and decide to bring suit. As most terms of use contain an arbitration clause (or mandated dispute resolution process) and disclaimers of liability,…
Unlike traditional corporate entities with a typical hierarchical structure, a decentralized autonomous organization (“DAO”) – a management structure that uses blockchain technology – functions as a leaderless entity. Without a formal corporate structure, DAOs instead operate by distributing governance rights among persons who hold a specific governance token. Consequently, federal and state courts have been…
The SEC suffered a significant loss last week in its ongoing legal battle with Ripple over the XRP digital token. While the District Court held that Ripple’s initial sales of XRP to institutional investors constituted the sale of unregistered securities, it was a Pyrrhic victory as the court held that all other ways in which…
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…
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…
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.
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…
