In a public statement on Thursday, Chairman Heath Tarbert announced that he will be leaving the Commodity Futures Trading Commission early next year. In listing accomplishments over the course of his term, Tarbert included that "We have promoted responsible fintech innovation and declared Ether a commodity." This tracks with Tarbert's broader interest in the crypto markets and earlier statements affirming that Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) should not face regulation as securities. Tarbert, who joined the CFTC in 2019, has been a noted voice for sound crypto regulation at the federal level. He joins a laundry list of appointed regulators …

Shares of Silvergate Capital (NYSE:SI) are in freefall this week, while the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, has revealed a large liquidation of company stock by board member Thomas Dircks. The security regulator’s Form 4 documentation shows Dircks sold 60,000 Class A Common Stock over eight transactions on Dec. 8. The largest transaction was the disposal of 37,192 shares at a price of $40.72. In total, the sales netted Dircks over $2.4 million. Dircks is listed as a member of the board for Silvergate Bank, which provides lending and deposit services for “innovative businesses in fintech and cryptocurrency.” …

Nine members of congress have written a letter asking the Securities and Exchange Commission to get its security token guidance straightened out. In a Dec. 9 letter to SEC Chairman Jay Clayton, several members of the Congressional Blockchain Caucus led by Tom Emmer (R-MN) asked the commission to verify rules as to which broker-dealers can custody digital securities. Broker-dealer licensing is required to sell securities in the U.S. The letter also addresses the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), a self-regulating body that registers U.S. broker-dealers under SEC guidelines. Currently, the rules are unclear, which has resulted in a colossal hold-up …

Dissolved limited liability company Crypto Traders Management is seeing its legal troubles multiply. Per a Friday legal filing in Utah, CTM and its former manager Shawn Cutting are trying to fight off a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC is apparently demanding financial data from Cutting — specifically, all of the transaction information from his Wells Fargo accounts as well as his communications with the bank. Cutting is trying to quash the SEC's request by pleading a right to financial privacy. Back in July, former investors in CTM filed a civil suit accusing the firm of selling …

Blockstack may be about to go where no token has gone before, by metamorphizing from a security to a non-security, as far as U.S. regulators are concerned. In a Monday blog post, Blockstack CEO Muneeb Ali published a legal memorandum in which the firm argues that its Stacks (STX) tokens will no longer qualify as securities once the new blockchain launches. The firm predicts that Stacks Blockchain 2.0 will be live "at the end of 2020 or the beginning of 2021." But what does the new blockchain have to do with securities law? Blockstack held its initial coin offering under …

Earlier this year, Telegram announced that it was abandoning the Telegram Open Network — reeling from the effects of a drawn-out legal battle with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. But because TON was an open-source project, with its entire code published on GitHub, the story was far from over. Here, Ton Labs CTO Mitja Goroshevsky reveals how a “devastating” setback was transformed into a decentralized movement involving tens of thousands of people. 1. What happened after Telegram left TON? A community came together and launched the Free TON network based on TON technology independently. The first version of …

Every Friday, Law Decoded delivers analysis on the week’s critical stories in the realms of policy, regulation and law. Editor's note For several weeks, rumors have circulated in the United States that the Treasury Department under Steven Mnuchin is planning some sort of rulemaking to ban or severely restrict self-hosted cryptocurrency wallets. The Treasury hasn’t made any public statements to support these rumors, but they are persistent and pervasive enough to be worth paying attention to. In the broader cycle of financial news, Secretary Mnuchin is currently under a lot more scrutiny for his plans to return nearly half a …

Hester Peirce, commissioner for the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, explained during an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph that decentralized finance, also known as DeFi, has created new challenges for the SEC. Peirce, nicknamed “Crypto Mom” for her interest in digital-asset innovation, mentioned that the quickly rising DeFi sector has resulted in a number of unresolved legal issues: "DeFi has posed a challenge for the SEC in a similar way that the ICO boom did in 2017. What is different here is that the pace of DeFi has actually been much faster. I also think that the legal issues are …

Per a Dec. 3 announcement, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission’s fintech team will become an independent office. Initially launched in 2018 under the guidance of Bill Hinman, the SEC’s Strategic Hub for Innovation and Financial Technology, or FinHub, has been a leading force in securities regulation as it applies to new technologies since its inception. Given that the same timeframe has seen a major ramping up of the SEC’s pursuit of initial coin offerings it deemed as unregistered security sales, FinHub has been busy. The shift to an independent office means that rather than reporting to the Division …

As Cointelegraph reported two weeks ago, the Securities and Exchange Commission put out a rare no-action letter in defense of IMVU’s new blockchain-based VCOIN. VCOIN is only the third digital token to get such legal protection from the U.S. securities regulator, which makes it an exciting development. The SEC has been extremely active in punishing initial coin offerings that it views as unregistered securities offerings, but it has been more reluctant to define what does not count as a security — a problem that Commissioner Hester Peirce noted just last night. A no-action letter is, however, not the same as …

As Ripple reportedly prepares to relocate its headquarters outside of the United States, it turns out that only 5% of the company’s clients are based in the country, according to the firm’s CEO. On Dec. 2, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse sat for an interview with CNN anchor Julia Chatterley to discuss Ripple’s regulatory hurdles in operating in the U.S. According to Garlinghouse, as much as 95% of the San Francisco-based company’s customers are located abroad. He claimed that Ripple’s services are not as popular in the U.S. due to the ongoing regulatory uncertainty around its associate token XRP, Garlinghouse said: …

Hester Peirce, commissioner for the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and best known by the affectionate nickname “Crypto Mom,” says the regulator may not be able to get by if it simply incorporatesng digital assets into its existing regulatory framework. In an interview with Santander Bank Managing Director John Whelan for the 'Ethereum in the Enterprise - Asia Pacific' online conference today, Peirce said the SEC could learn from other approaches on regulating crypto, specifically citing Wyoming as an “extremely progressive” regulator. The state’s banking board approved charters for crypto firms like Avanti and Kraken in October. By contrast, …