U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler says that just about every crypto asset is a security.
In an interview with the New York Magazine, Gensler that every coin besides Bitcoin () is a security.
According to Gensler, all other crypto assets have promoters who try to bypass US regulators and investors who expect to profit.
“Everything other than Bitcoin, you can find a website, you can find a group of entrepreneurs, they might set up their legal entities in a tax haven offshore, they might have a foundation, they might lawyer it up to try to arbitrage and make it hard jurisdictionally or so forth…
They might drop their tokens overseas at first and contend or pretend that it’s going to take six months before they come back to the US. But at the core, these tokens are securities because there’s a group in the middle and the public is anticipating profits based on that group.”
Gensler also says that some crypto firms are offering a broad range of services in a manner that is “commingled and is rife with conflicts” and would not be allowed in the traditional markets.
“The conflicts in these storefronts, we do not allow in traditional finance, we don’t allow in the securities markets, we don’t allow it in the commercial banking markets, and we don’t allow it in crypto because these storefronts are fundamentally and generally non-compliant with the securities laws as we know them…
Whether they call themselves lending or staking as a service or exchanges, they’re bringing together millions of customers.”
Shortly after getting appointed as Chair of the SEC in 2021, Gensler that “a lot of crypto tokens are indeed securities.”
