There is nothing new here.
The guidance was issued back in March of 2013, close to 5 years ago, and for the most part has been ignored by the industry. https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/FIN-2013-G001.pdf It is not just ICOs but also pre mines, founders rewards etc. It was followed through with enforcement action against Ripple in 2015 https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fincen-fines-ripple-labs-inc-first-civil-enforcement-action-against-virtual.
The guidance was issued back in March of 2013, close to 5 years ago, and for the most part has been ignored by the industry. https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/FIN-2013-G001.pdf It is not just ICOs but also pre mines, founders rewards etc. It was followed through with enforcement action against Ripple in 2015 https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fincen-fines-ripple-labs-inc-first-civil-enforcement-action-against-virtual.
Indeed, it's very obvious that ICO administrators fit the definition of "administrator" in FinCEN's 2013 guidance. They are in the business of issuing virtual currency and have the authority to redeem it. This is clear because ICOs and the associated tokens are completely centralized. Ripple is similarly centralized. It had a closed-source centralized repository. It was open-sourced well after the network was live. Even thereafter, all Ripple clients were set to trust Ripple Labs' validation nodes by default -- fully centralized. FinCEN addressed this specifically in 2013:
A handful of coins are not impacted, Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Monero come to mind. These are coins where all the new money supply is generated by persons own "computing or manufacturing effort" and have no "central depository and no single administrator".
FinCEN made a clear distinction between those who create virtual currency and use it to purchase goods and services (users) vs. those who create virtual currency and sells those units for real currency (money transmitters).
Pre-mining or insta-mining does not require a central repository or single administrator, and early miners are still obtaining coins by computing/manufacturing effort.
Similarly, a founders' reward is literally part of the decentralized protocol. No central repository or single administrator required, and (in Zcash, for example) miners still obtain most of the block rewards through computing effort.
For a pre-mine or a founder's reward the holder of the keys for the pre mine or founders reward becomes an "administrator" or an "exchanger" under the guidance. In the enforcement action action against Ripple (Statement of Facts) Ripple Labs is considered and "exchanger" and Ripple is described as "pre mined" https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/Ripple_Facts.pdf
