According to reports, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission is apparently looking into certain securities offerings sold by cryptocurrency exchange Kraken if they broke any regulations.
The investigation pertains to specific services that Kraken has made to customers in the United States, according to a Feb. 8 Bloomberg article. According to a source with knowledge of the situation, the investigation is well along and a resolution may occur soon.
It is unclear at this time, however, which offers the securities regulator is paying close attention to.
The SEC does not comment on the presence or nonexistence of a potential inquiry, an SEC representative stated in response to a question regarding the supposed investigation.
Gensler said in December that his major objective for regulating cryptocurrency in 2023 was to bring crypto exchanges and lending platforms into compliance. He claimed that this could be done by registering companies with the SEC or by taking enforcement action against them.
There aren’t any tokens out there that are securities that we’re interested in listing, said Kraken CEO Dave Ripley in September, adding that he didn’t see a need to register Kraken as an exchange with the SEC since it doesn’t provide securities.
Gary Gensler, the chairman of the SEC, has said several times that he views most cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin as securities.
The sale of LBRY Credits (LBC) in the secondary market, however, does not constitute a security, the SEC recently conceded during a Jan. 30 appeal hearing in the LBRY v. SEC case. The judge was persuaded by an argument from attorney John Deaton highlighting the fact that the courts had never deemed the underlying asset to be a security in similar cases.
The “Howey test” is often used by the regulator to evaluate what qualifies as a security. The 1946 SEC v. Howey decision, which established a precedent for what transactions are regarded as securities in the US, is where the name of the concept originated.
It was determined that a transaction meets the criteria for an investment contract, and is thus regarded as a security, where there is an investment in a shared firm whose earnings are only derived from the labor of others.