Matt Levine, Columnist

Crypto Offerings Slowly Grow Up

Also guns, student loans, and a whole bunch of other stuff from last week.

March 8, 2018 at 3:05 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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The crypto.

In the beginning, people assumed that if you called something a "cryptocurrency" and did an "initial coin offering," then it was not a "security" and didn't need to be registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That did not last long: Lawyers soon looked at the ICOs that were getting done and realized that most of them were obviously investments of money in business ventures that legally counted as securities offerings. (Eventually the SEC caught up too.)