Topic: Do you think all ICO are securities ? (Read 796 times)

Investing into cryptocurrencies market during icos has proven to be one of the most scamming way of investing.  Billions of dollars has been invested into projects that did not exist any were except in the imagination of the fakes developers.  I personally has lose money investing into many projects that turned out to be scam or abandon.  Cryptocoins market is not security and before you invest into it please seek professional advice.

I absolutely agree with this opinion. ICO can consider real if it is tied with real production, goods or service. For the development of similar projects, the team will carry out all possibilities. And the real actions of this is visible at once.

While I'm a fan of BTC and a few Pow coins with zero premine/dev holdings, almost all of these "ICO" "offerings" are utter garbage. Trash. Worthless.

The term "securities" lends way to much credit as to their real worth and stature in the business world.

Unsecurities is more like it.

Here is my brilliant opinion, for me all fo the ICO's would not be considered as securities for a lot of fo reasons to tell. First of all, it is all decentralized. The blockchain made it possible for the people to have these ICO's. This is a full risk. Since not every ICOs will go successful, I would consider ICO's as another type of gambling.

There is no general answer to this question. Each jurisdiction has its own view on whether tokens offered in an ICO are securities or some other kind of financial instrument. Certain tokens might not even be regulated in some jurisdictions. While the SEC dominates the discussions at the moment, there are good reasons to take a look at regulators in other jurisdictions.

There is one more thing you should consider. Just because you are compliant in one jurisdiction, it does not mean that you can sell your tokens compliantly in other jurisdictions. Let's say your token is not regulated in Singapore, but you intend to sell it to investors from the US, you must comply with US regulations. The same is true for any other jurisdiction in which you target investors.

Securities ? Huh ?  you mean to say secure ? Well no they were not .  ico's are not secure and infact most of them were actually risky because they are only online with no physical offices that you can go whenever you want to inquire for for more details regarding on their project . 

Although there are still fewer ico's left that are secure or more legit because they are compose of a real team with a serious plan in order to serve the people with a good service  .

current ICOs are not securities. but security token offerings (STOs ) are coming on the blockchain soon. ownership of real world assets on the blockchain is upon us.

https://coinweez.com/tokenization-on-blockchain/

The ICO model that offers security tokens, brings a lot of questions when it comes to the legal part. Based on the legal view, security tokens are explained very different in comparison of what we think of them now.

https://coincodex.com/article/2465/what-is-the-howey-test-and-how-is-it-relevant-to-crypto/

I really think the market  Crypto at current is not securities.
But in the not so distant future it will change completely. One day the SEC going accept Bitcoin ETF and more Altcoin...

No, there are a lot of different kind of token, each jurisdiction will stabilish it! Law of MAlta are different than Swiss law.. different from US law... there's no only U.S. SEC!!!

I don't think any of the icos are securities and alot need to be done in future before we can make significant progress on that.  Icos need to be approved by sec before people should invest in as a lot is currently happening in the market.

I think only some ICOs are securities. Others are pure platforms for decentralized APPS, like Ethereum and EOS. Some ICOs like OPU provides a specter of solutions in a specific industry, in OPU case it is skincare. And of course don’t forget about cryptocurrencies that are pure substitute for fiat money. Hope that helps.

Likewise investment in bitcoin or altcoin its same, there is no secure for us to spend money. But in this world not everyone is evil and deceives many people, cryptocurrency is always visited by newcomers because there are still many who care and there are still many people who are good at making a profit. And the problem is scam, it depends on us, depending on the investor, you will not be fooled if you want to be careful choosing a place to save money. I guess it's time to forget the government, because it's useless.

Fraud, scum, sleazy founders? Sure...


I have been working in IT company which help to launch ICO and as the staff behind the scenes, I can always tell a scum from a real thing. It's enough to just examine the whitepaper or discuss the project with the client. But, you know, money is money - we don't say no even if we see that the project will end up as a deceit (and, believe us, we're are not alone in our pragmatism). Nor we expose those who don't want to be exposed - some business rules cannot be broken.

Yet, believe or not, accomplishing such projects doesn't feel fine. We're interested in truthful ICOs and honest investees. We honestly believe in a better future of the ICO and we would like to be on the right side when it arrives. Finally, we take care of our reputation. And, as you must have already noticed, we're making ourselves a bit of an ad.

That's where out motivation comes from.


Getting Wrong Things Right

Many, primarily those who've already succeeded in losing money, prefer blaming ICO creators, governments, blockchain - in short everything and everyone except for themselves.

We don't agree. Not a single ICO cap has been achieved with a gun put to the investor's head. Folks voluntarily give money to a random guy on the Internet, whose fault is that?

According to the latest statistics, only about 40% of the cryptocurrency investors bother themselves with merely reading the whitepaper - the alpha and omega of any crowdfunding activity. What it means is that more than a half of those who contribute their money have no idea about who is the one they're dealing with or what it is he's going to attempt.

Look at this. Guys had excellent fun (and also largely inspired this article) while still raising real money. $247,300 according to their own website, more realistic but still impressive $80,520 according to this stat.

The simplicity, openness and lack of regulation in the area indeed fuel the flames, but they are barely the source. The greediness and go-happy-lucky attitude of the "investors" seems like a more realistic answer.

To prove this predictably unpopular point, some examples of how dubious affairs helped not particularly discerning people to lose millions in the past should be introduced.

Read more here: http://bit.ly/2N05CYk

I think icos are not secure and many investors including me has lost money in investing into unsecured icos.  I think governments has to come in to straighten some things in cryptocurrencies especially the hackers and icos scammers.

I think that we will see the end of the far-fetched utility tokens. Not all of them are securities, but even less of them have any utility.

I don't they had any choice in the case of BTC and ETH. Can you imagine that hanging on the books? They could use that violation as an excuse to do whatever they want, whenever they want, to anyone in crypto.

Investment = Security.  It's a very simple way to look at it. The only ICO I've seen that is not a security is http://myke.ai/whitepaper. And it should be.  The value of the token, even after the project is complete, is relative to its prospects.

The conversation needs to move forward: if ICOs are securities, what comes next? Stop worrying about what you can't change, and put energy toward what you can.

The definition of "accredited investor" must change.

Right now, it's not a way to protect people, it's a way to take money from the working class and give it to rich brokers. 

I have a weird feeling that these ICO's are ran by the same different groups of people. I see the same faces over and over on all ICOs. I mean, how can you be the ceo of 3 projects in one year. People have a hard time maintain one company

ICO's has been used by many scammers they just feed up some appealing information,projects and other more just to accumulate more funds for their scam acts and maybe in this case ICO's should really needed to govern by any legal institutions so that those new project cames are trusted and became more reliable.

Every year ICO is growing, the innovations and technologies they offer make some investors interested in spending the money. But the problem is, is ICO system is safe? I mean does not lead to scam project? this will always be feared by investors.

Until now there is no body governing the security ICO, which decided the ICO will run smoothly and every investor will get a profit. Innovation can be designed by scammers and this is very easy to do by them. Cryptocurrency needs full oversight to make the system safe, this is what I always expect forward to in the future.

Bitcoin and Ethereum cannot be securities,so they do not have a single owner. Tokens on ICO, which have a contract and a single distribution center, can be recognized as securities. On the other hand, securities should be provided with any material values, and tokens do not yet have them.

Some of them are securities, some of them are not securities.

The bad image of cryptocurrency from various people who think cryptocurrency is a scam is partly due to the ICO project. We remember a few months ago google, facebook and twitter all three agreed to ban any form of advertising cryptocurrency on its platform, their karens have a strong reason the ICO project has made their users lose. This pointed out ICO project is not 100% secure, many of which are ICO projects that end up with a scam.

At the end of the day everything can be a securities, if the government wants to enforce it. For example, rewards points from big retail store, ebay, amazon, etc can also be considered a securities, however, the masses have agreed that it is not. Eth and btc are are securites, however, teh SEC have decided (because people are willing to agree that it is not) that they are not securities. So, everything is a security, which can be approved if there is mass adoption and support from the public.

No, I do not think they are 100% secure, but you have to deal with that. Plus, as we are heading forward, I am sure there will be more safer and safer ways to participate in ICOs.

In this Era of the digitalization of things, security is of utmost concerned.

I think most of them are NOT securities, especially if they have a utility function in the project you are willing to invest (utility token). But some of them are recognized as securities (while others are masked by a utility token, while in reality are securities).

NEX, for example, is a new ICO that should start in short amount of time, which is a recognized security.

I think that we need to chouse project for investing with with zealousness

I understand Switzerland defines them as private money assets, like Amazon gift cards or gold coins not issued by a goverment mint.I can see how they fit into that category much easier, although recent annoiuncmenets form Bafin(Germany is similar is suggetsing that the two are not exclusive) They cna be tokens and securites.

ICO are securities, I think not...for me the ICO is direct to the point of investment and your money already expose somehow or some way. Don't make it complicated to the other idea of security, cause ICO is sounds like gambling without any assurance that your asset will gonna make profit. Please don't misunderstood what I'm saying on it.

No. Securities are basically classified as whether it is an equity or debt and one way or another, this pertains to the fact that there must be some representation of ownership of the financial instrument from one entity to another (i.e., stocks and bonds, options, futures and forwards, etc.) At the very least, that's what I understand about securities; a financial security with a promise of ownership or pay off for the utilization of liquid cash.

Any ICO as a share or pays a dividend will be classed as a security, because technically crypto isn't regulated correctly it may go under the radar, but it may not, that's the risk. The only time an ICO is not a security, and there is still disagreement about this, is when it is a buyback. I know some people launching an ICO which are $10, $100, $1,000 coins but act as bonds paying a fixed return per week via coin buybacks, first in first out, that is not a security, if it were the bond markets around the world would freeze up.

IMO pretty much. Being a new and emerging technology it makes sense that there are different types of token offerings. But based on the behaviour of both the token and the token owner when you get down to it all tokens have a security value/property.

Of course, not everyone can have a guarantee that your data is protected. It's only your responsibility.

Only if you don't have the token on the exchanges and simply exchange it to developed software or tech, then it will be a utility. But still, there is more to that.

Take a look at this article, there is a lot of useful stuff:
https://medium.com/@argongroup/8-important-things-to-know-about-security-tokens-token-regulation-3d548a1a6367

Also, there was a form by SEC, can't find it now, but there was a questionnaire in it about the token purpose, so if you get more than 5 points you're a security, and it's quite hard to get less than 15.

Registering ICO with SEC is a long process that involves a lot of bureaucracy that requires not only all of the verifications and paperwork but also is quite expensive, if you're running a large ICO, you'll pay at least 10-20%

Best regards,
Dimitri

Well not really there are some that are! check out this one, and tell me what you think
https://medium.com/@lympo.io/hold-on-to-your-helmets-we-are-distributing-company-shares-to-lym-token-holders-e0030d886e84

I would say that some ICOs are bordering on securities. Particularly the ones that pay dividends, or giving you voting rights in how the ICO company proceeds in future. Maybe they should be called security tokens.

BTC is the original utility token, all ICOs should clearly tell you if they are a security or utility before pre-sale. We need a better transparent system of identitying this.

Not all ICO's are securities. 

Unlike traditional venture capital and stock markets, the ICO market allows everyone and anyone to be involved, noone should be allowed to say you cannot do an ICO or make a cryptocurrency, it is a lot like the pinks sheets market in the way that 90% of them will be bad, except it cannot be regulated ever because of the natural state of the ICO market being for everyone.  However, that doesn't meant now that all ICOs are bad just because it can be compared to the pink sheets market.  The truth is 90% of the ICO market is going to be fake, the point to see is not that ICO market is like pink sheets market and that means the ICO market is bad, the point is that there are still some gems to see in these markets where there is mostly a lot of bad, regulating it won't change that, just like a heavily government regulated pink sheets market does not even change the fact most of the pink sheet markets are scams.  There tons of scams in the stock markets, regulation cannot stop scamming, especially things like banks, which get around regulations and create what can be called legal scams.  Most in the crypto world will be scams but there will always still be some breakthroughs here, and those winners will pay for the losses.

Overall, there will be a higher success rate however by participating in the ICO market because the superior architecture of open source crypto networks and blockchain technology is involved.  Instead of me building some proprietary software in a closed room, when doing an ICO I am trying to build a project and at the same time share my views, beliefs, and insights with all the people out there because I'm trying to build a community around my idea and open source technology that is decentralized and has some incentive to hold the same beliefs as me.  This superior element that sets the ICO economy from securities and stock markets is the hands on community element over time, the fact that anyone and everyone who wants to can participate in the community and contribute to a project improves odds of success.  Yeah it seems anyone who goes out there saying "buy my thing, buy my thing" might just be a scammer, but that shouldn't be something that stops the ICO market from allowing anyone and everyone to get involved.  In every industry there is people who are scammers, regulation will only allow things that are legal scams to exist, that in turn will ultimately allow people to oppress other people more easily, just like what happens in the old and outdated financial world will happen in the crypto world, does stopping some obvious scams through more regulation out weight the benefits of allowing something for everything to exist in a more self-regulated manner?

There are people who have the knowledge and they are a number of individualized people who make big return from the ICO market, ANYONE can make big return from ICO market, unlike in a securities market or stock market where regulations favor the big players and those with the most connection discriminate outsiders, where the people who have the knowledge and make the big return are the ones working for proprietary entities and proprietary ends like banks and hedge funds, that is what will happen if ICO market will become heavily regulated, it will be the opposite of what crypto was built for.  Crypto was built to eliminate the middle men, but regulators will become the new middle men to innovation.  There is still less than 20 million people playing in the ICO market, in the end the market is only worth around $388 billion based on the coin market cap website.  For something that everyone and anyone can participate in this still appears to be very low still, once it becomes even easier to get involved, look at the $8.5 trillion dollars being the height of the dot com boom, there will soon be a compelling argument made that the crypto boom will bring a market cap of over $100 trillion dollars at its peak (with hyperinflation of the USD). After all, this is the new Internet, the unsecured data transport protocol of the old Internet will be replaced entirely by the secure data transport protocol of the blockchain.  Cryptocurrencies, crypto assets and tokens come with along with this to represent a unit of account in these new communities and commons that are being built around the new secure data transport protocol, and so do new business models and market opportunities exist now that interaction and transaction on the Internet will become totally secured. 

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No,not at all. I think that ICOs are building an innovative new market.

Of course not.

ICO is certainly not 100% secured and cannot be compared to shares in a company

That is very dependent on the jurisdictions they are issued in. However, the old thinking a la "I will just add a useless functionality and then I have a utility token" won't please a regulator like the SEC, that's for sure. But also its important to see that not every regulator thinks like SEC.


Midas is an investment app for retail investors on top of the Melon protocol.

The Token Generation Event is planned for end of Q2 2018 and the launched token is an uncertified security under Swiss law. The founders of Midas actually think that tokenized securities are the use-case of the future.

Their view on the topic of tokenized seucrities and what exactly they are launching you can find in this MEDIUM POST

No, not all. You need to carry out a background check, the development team, their roadmap, future goal, market cap, total circulating supply. If “Yes” for all this checklist, you can go ahead and enjoy good returns once token listed on other exchanges.

On general or technically speaking cryptocurrencies cant really be considered as securities because as being mentioned securities means you do have a share or bond and as being said crypto tokens doesnt really work on this way.You might holding up a token but doesnt really signify that this would be a security. Some people do insist regarding into this matter but well its their own beliefs as long we do know how crypto works then just let other people do treat on what they are believing.

No one can say this ICO %100 safe but they are trying to eliminate scammers . If they could succeed everyone wins. There is a some project for this problem. You can invest.

Centralized regulation on crypto are all doomed to fail.  Centralized regulators and their central governments only try to remain relevant in the ever moving world by attempting to fit cryptocurrencies into their little boxes of control.  Any regulation on crypto needs to be conducted at the protocol level, and not by centralized regulators or the central government which are prone to and will lead to corruption, eventually.  Everyone and everything has a price, however, when decentralizing regulation itself corruption will be economically inviable.

Each person thinks, but in my opinion, ico is a kind of investment suitable for everyone. But it takes time and experience...

Recently i've visited the conference about regulation of ICO's market. So, the speakes have analysed more than 600 projects, so thats why 95% of it has security tokens. Many venture investors don't understand why utility tokens are volatility about 30% per day.

So far, I believe yes. --> https://www.coindesk.com/sec-chief-clayton-every-ico-ive-seen-security/

The very definition of a security means that you own a stake in the company, whereas ICO tokens don't allow you a stake in the company behind the ICO.

They're not shares, they're not securities, bonds or any of the like, they're simply tokens, they're in a new class of investment.

Agreed 

I do not think so, if a token is not linked to financial performance and gives no voting rights than it should not be considered as security

This is the difference when we do try to compare ICO and traditional securities which ICO don't have product which you can possess on.You might be a shareholder but doesn't guaranteed you out on making money for long term which it will really fall into investment category which is 100% suits in.

I do not think ICOs are securities. Most of them in my opinion, are just mere investment  which involve risks because you are paying with no products but are hopeful of the project/ICO to be successful to get big gain from your investments. So in order to have less risky investment in ICOs you have to do your own research, the whitepaper, the team, and the company itself.

Hi guys, im new to icos but i realized that most of the times i cannot buy as much tokens as i want. I read about this mkk pool https://discord.gg/FHKZGGX yesterday, they organize kind of a pools for pre-sales? Has anyone heard of them? Any experience? Are they trustworthy?

I have been advised of the following:
1. No you cannot offset the responsibility of KYC/AML to anyone and you are the sole responsible. What can happen is that you can enlist the services of an entity that you trust would do a good job at KYC/AML, but if they fak up then it's your ass. All you can do is chase them back for some of their fees. So you should know what your target audience is and make sure your payment processor has good experience in the countries where they accept payment from.

I agree PayPal is not seller friendly and it is the worst service on this planet and I will not use it nor do I recommend any seller use PayPal for any reason whatsoever. I was just giving an example. I am still looking for a good payment processor that does AML?KYC if you know any.

2. The laws go deep into the substance of the ICO and not the form of ownership of the token to determine whether it is a security or not, and they err on the side of the more conservative interpreation.

PayPal is not sellerfriendly payment processor. I suppose they will have big problems soon.

ICO securities not 100% secure, but they try make it more better for the secure. ICO technologies and innovation every years growing.
In the future I sure ICO securities will be more secure. Many ICO will coming up in this year, new different technologies and innovation.

Some of them are securites some of them are not securities, depending on what you are selling, this regulation classifies ICOs in 3 groups:

https://www.finma.ch/en/~/media/finma/dokumente/dokumentencenter/myfinma/1bewilligung/fintech/wegleitung-ico.pdf?la=en

What I want to know though is that since PayPal accepts now to be the payment processor for ICOs (check this link: https://parkgene.io/parkgene-ico-now-accepting-paypal-payments/)

does this mean that if we want to make an ICO, we do not need to worry about KYC/AML anymore? PayPal takes care of this for us?

I think that we need to chouse project for investing with with zealousness, since you can not only lose money but also give your nifty to unnecessary people!

I thing ico are not securities and as a new innovation we should treat it as such.  Ico or tokens market should not be recognized by the sec as stocks or share, commodities and securities but a new markets that should have its own policies. The more we go about cryptocurrencies the more understanding we would get on how to used it to become of a great benefits to us all.

https://www.coindesk.com/no-not-icos-securities/

This article brings to light that all ICO's are Not securities, I personally don't think any of them fit into the SEC square box nicely of how they define one. This is a completely new and different asset class and should be treated as one when it comes to regulation. I find it ironic that there is a Securities forum to chat on here, are we trying to support uncle Sam or take him down with this forum?