Ripple Chief Executive Officer Brad Garlinghouse had a similar view regarding regulatory risks. Teams listing companies offshore and selling their coins to investors outside the U.S. are naïve to think there are no investor protection laws elsewhere, and also expects that the SEC will eventually say cryptocurrencies are securities, he said in an interview last week.
Ripple is a money-transfer company based on the blockchain technology, that’s tied to the third-largest cryptocurrency by market value.
“ICOs operating in the Wild West of finance isn’t sustainable,” Garlinghouse said. “If it talks like a duck and walks like a duck, the SEC will say it’s a duck.”
Actually Ripple was the subject of regulatory enforcement by FinCEN and not the SEC in 2015
https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fincen-fines-ripple-labs-inc-first-civil-enforcement-action-against-virtual This follows the FInCEN guidance issued in 2013
https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/FIN-2013-G001.pdf A the heart of the enforcement action is the fact that Ripple was pre-mined
The currency of the Ripple network, known as “XRP,” was pre-mined. In other words, unlike some other virtual currencies, XRP was fully generated prior to its distribution. As of 2015, XRP is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market Capitalization, after Bitcoin.
From
https://www.fincen.gov/si :-\tes/default/files/shared/Ripple_Facts.pdfICOs by their very nature are pre-mined and would consequently be subject a similar type of enforcement action by FinCEN. In some cases ICOs may also be securities and be subject also to enforcement by the SEC. I do not agree with Garlinghouse's comment that the SEC will consider cryptocurrencies to be securities in cases such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monero etc where there is no pre-mine. My take is that he is trying to paint everyone else with the same or a similar brush that Ripple was painted with.
Edit: By its very nature a security needs someone to be its issuer. Who is this legal person in the case of a
de-centralized virtual currency as defined by FinCEN in their 2013 guidance above?