Podcast Center
Video Center
Webcasts
Resource Center
Events
January 23, 2018 at 12:03 PM
Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton warned lawyers Monday that the agency’s staff is “on high alert” for approaches to initial coin offerings, or ICOs, that “may be contrary to the spirit of our securities laws and the professional obligations of the U.S. securities bar.”
Clayton told attendees at the Securities Regulation Institute that unregistered securities investments offered by unregistered promoters “with no securities lawyers or accountants on the scene, are, in a word, dangerous.”
However, he pointed to two examples of how attorneys’ handling of ICOs is lacking.
“Most disturbing,” Clayton said, is ICOs where “lawyers involved appear to be, on the one hand, assisting promoters in structuring offerings of products that have many of the key features of a securities offering, but call it an ‘ICO,’ which sounds pretty close to an ‘IPO,’” Clayton said.
