Matt Levine, Columnist

SEC Halts a Silly Initial Coin Offering

A case that was good entertainment, but not very informative.

December 5, 2017 at 10:00 AM 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.

Still waiting for clarity.
Photographer: Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty Images

Provide news feedback or report an error

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

Last year some Ethereum developers raised money from investors for a thing called the Decentralized Autonomous Organization, which was meant to pool the investors' money and invest it in some Ethereum-projects-to-be-named-later under a complicated governance structure. It was all very blockchainy and 2016, and it raised its money -- more than $150 million worth of ether at the time -- without doing anything to comply with U.S. (or anywhere else's) securities laws. This was totally illegal! But that was the least of the DAO's problems. It also got hacked and had its money stolen and led to a fork of the Ethereum blockchain and was generally a pretty deep soul-searching moment for the cryptocurrency community.

It was also a soul-searching moment for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which eventually -- this July, over a year after the DAO's brief moment in the sun -- released a report noting that the DAO was totally illegal but that it wasn't going to do anything about it: