Following the session that took place last August, a three-judge panel from India’s Supreme Court reconvened once again this week to discuss the much-hyped Crypto v. RBI case. During the last hearing, the Supreme Court had asked the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to clarify its position as to why exactly it enforced a nationwide banking ban on the country’s crypto market, as well as to discuss the seemingly unconstitutional nature of its aforementioned move. Ever since the RBI decided to go ahead and issue its controversial prohibition order, a number of public and industry-led petitions have been filed by …
In 2019, we witnessed crypto regulations leave the domain of stuffy legal pontification and enter the realm of geopolitics (as a stuffy legal pontificator, I have mixed feelings about this). We saw President Trump tweet about crypto regulations, as well as powerful international organizations express their agenda on how crypto should be regulated. We saw bold, forward-looking moves from smaller nations play out, and crypto-schizophrenic China plant its flag somewhere on the cryptomoon, though we still don’t know on which side. These actions illustrate the global regulatory landscape evolving along the contours of the legacy international financial order inherited from …
Security token offerings, or STOs, have more or less taken the mantle from their semi-defunct counterpart, the initial coin offering (ICO). Still, the extreme rise and subsequent fall of the ICO has left quite an impression on the cryptocurrency industry. At its peak prevalence in 2017, this novel fundraising prototype accumulated a total of $6.2 billion — but it wasn’t set to last. Come December of the same year, ICOs had become a shadow of their former selves, plummeting in demand. So far, a mere $366 million has been raised via ICOs in 2019, a retrace of 94% from their …
Japanese crypto trading platform Liquid has partnered with venture capital consortium Virtual Currency Partners (VCP) to create a jointly-owned entity that will pave the way for Liquid’s expansion to the United States. The news was revealed in an official announcement on April 29. As recently reported, Liquid hit unicorn status earlier this month with the first close of an ongoing Series C funding that put the company’s valuation at over $1 billion. According to today’s announcement, Liquid and VCP’s joint entity, Liquid Financial USA Inc. (Liquid USA), will support the expansion of Liquid’s crypto trading services to the U.S., subject …
The Chamber of Digital Commerce Token Alliance has released a collaborative report of proposed guidelines for “responsible growth” of the cryptocurrency market, according to their July 30 press release. The Chamber of Digital Commerce is a blockchain and cryptocurrency advocacy group, founded by Perianne Boring in 2014. The document, entitled “Understanding Digital Tokens: Market Overviews & Guidelines for Policymakers & Practitioners,” is broken up into three sections: a regulatory overview of digital token markets in five countries, principles for those distributing digital tokens that are not intended to be securities, and economic coverage of the “global token landscape.” Paul Atkins, …