Chapter 14: Legal and Regulatory Issues in the Temporary Regime

In the view of regulators, blockchain is defined only in the context and presence of cryptocurrency. Indeed, the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) has declared that all digital currency transactions are recorded in a blockchain (Morton 2018). More importantly, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lists initial coin offerings (ICOs) as “fundraising events” tied to “a blockchain technology or cryptographically secured ledger” (SEC Complaint, Kik Interactive 2019, p. 8). Concomitantly, a decentralized autonomous organization is “a ‘virtual’ organization embodied in computer code and executed on a distributed ledger or blockchain” (DAO Report 2017, pp. 2‒3). With blockchain and alt-currencies being repeatedly uttered in the same breath, the strong hand of the SEC reaches blockchain seemingly without question. In turn, the omnipresent discipline by the $2 billion agency poses the most formidable legal challenge to the technology enabling digital capital formation and services.