Live data from Hacker News

SEC charges Impact Theory for unregistered offering of NFTs

sec.gov

91–100 of 257 posts

Re: SEC charges Impact Theory for unregistered offering of NFTs

#91
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the dissenters bring up a lot of good questions that need answering. However, if you believe their fundamental argument that NFTs aren't really securities... what regulatory body should prevent this kind of behavior? Or should rug-pulls effectively be legal, and buyer beware?

The Federal Trade Commission is fully equipped to handle consumer fraud.

are unending robocall frauds under their jurisdiction?

Re: SEC charges Impact Theory for unregistered offering of NFTs

#92
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the defendant settled, instead of fighting in court like they should have.

Its also worth nothing that the SEC is losing in court, losing the support of Congress and losing the support of the White House specifically as more people, including judges, notice this lack of distinction and the SEC’s unwillingness (and inability) to describe why there is a distinction there is either a way to issue crypto collections and collect money for them without being a security, or all other collections s…

That's not true, just wishful thinking on your part.

Not all collectibles are unregistered offerings, obviously. Being a collectible also doesn't mean it can't be an unregistered offering also. This one clearly was.

Re: SEC charges Impact Theory for unregistered offering of NFTs

#93
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a lot of reasons this mechanism would be interesting for a game developer besides trust. e.g. mitigating payment processor fees. But to your question of trust, one interesting application would be in distributed & decentralized games intended to be released to the commons, see Dark Forest or Lattice.xyz. For these OSS projects, even if the original game devs decided to stop development, the community could pe…

It’s a completely made up problem for which crypto is supposedly the solution - We’ve known for 2 decades how to do skin or items exchange between games. It involves relational databases. Valve does it for their games or at least could do it at will. There’s not one unsolved technical problem here - There is zero incentive for developers, publishers and licensors (you know the people that make up the game industry) t…

I'm not even a crypto bro, but it's honestly more exhausting to listen to someone go on about how private backends with user facing storefronts and relational databases solve the same problems as blockchain, than it is to listen to a crypto bro explain why we can't trust companies to manage records in their own relational database.

Re: SEC charges Impact Theory for unregistered offering of NFTs

#94
post #3

Its great to see commissioner Mark T Uyeda also dissenting, because for some time it was only Hester Pierce that would take these views on digital assets, and for her views to be elevated to head commissioner it requires a Republican President to make that nomination, as she is Republican. There are many people that are not Republican that would aim to get her appointed and do whatever it takes. Which means casting a…

> “Buying a founders key is [l]ike investing in Disney, Call of Duty, and YouTube all at once.”

The dissent even quotes Impact Theory's framing of the NFTs as an investment.

Given everything else, this is a pretty vanilla Howey test: they were selling shares with jpegs attached.

> Even if the NFT sales here fit squarely within Howey, is this set of facts one that warrants an enforcement action?

This dissent is really about the nature of enforcement, not whether these were unregistered securities.

Re: SEC charges Impact Theory for unregistered offering of NFTs

#95
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But if I sell you a hand drawn stick figure for $100, and you buy it with the mutual expectation that it will eventually be worth more because of the value of the brand/project, and the effort I put in to grow that value... isn't that a security, by definition? This seems equivalent to buying a baseball card of a specific player with the expectation that the player will put in effort into the game and thus increase…

It's really not equivalent. The player does not issue the card.

perhaps the player isn’t the important bit really. It’s the card manufacturer in fact. If I print a Nolan Ryan card no one cares. If a name brand does, and also promises to grow their brand and that will make it more valuable, maybe that is more closely related?

Re: SEC charges Impact Theory for unregistered offering of NFTs

#96
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if it's not a security, is it fraud? If I sell you a hand drawn stick figure for $100, and you buy it because it's "art", then there's no rug to pull. You bought it, and it doesn't matter to the artist whether the resale value goes up or down. If it goes down, it's still not fraud. But if I sell you a hand drawn stick figure for $100, and you buy it with the mutual expectation that it will eventually be worth mor…

>But if I sell you a hand drawn stick figure for $100, and you buy it with the mutual expectation that it will eventually be worth more because of the value of the brand/project, and the effort I put in to grow that value... isn't that a security, by definition? This seems equivalent to buying a baseball card of a specific player with the expectation that the player will put in effort into the game and thus increase…

The player does not issue the card. The player does not profit from any "appreciation" of the cards. The amount of player cards sold is nowhere near that of NFTs so the potential damage is limited and the history of player cards has always been for "collector" value and not a real investment. The history of NFTs has been since day one for Investment.

Re: SEC charges Impact Theory for unregistered offering of NFTs

#97
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At what point does a thing you buy or sell become a security? Are baseball cards a security? I don’t know about baseball cards, but the way Wizards of the Coast handles their policy around rare Magic: the Gathering cards makes me think their lawyers are definitely concerned about this kind of stuff.

WotC's steadfast refusal to publicly acknowledge the secondary resale market in any way gets comical at times, but they are a good example of how you should behave if you suspect you might have accidentally created a security.

Is there any chance you, or someone else with knowledge of this could elaborate?

Re: SEC charges Impact Theory for unregistered offering of NFTs

#98
post #3

Its great to see commissioner Mark T Uyeda also dissenting, because for some time it was only Hester Pierce that would take these views on digital assets, and for her views to be elevated to head commissioner it requires a Republican President to make that nomination, as she is Republican. There are many people that are not Republican that would aim to get her appointed and do whatever it takes. Which means casting a…

> it requires a Republican President to make that nomination, as she is Republican is that truly a requirement, or do you mean realistically it would not happen because of party politics?

just realistically. yes, the latter.

Re: SEC charges Impact Theory for unregistered offering of NFTs

#99
post #3

Its great to see commissioner Mark T Uyeda also dissenting, because for some time it was only Hester Pierce that would take these views on digital assets, and for her views to be elevated to head commissioner it requires a Republican President to make that nomination, as she is Republican. There are many people that are not Republican that would aim to get her appointed and do whatever it takes. Which means casting a…

> “Buying a founders key is [l]ike investing in Disney, Call of Duty, and YouTube all at once.” The dissent even quotes Impact Theory's framing of the NFTs as an investment. Given everything else, this is a pretty vanilla Howey test: they were selling shares with jpegs attached. > Even if the NFT sales here fit squarely within Howey, is this set of facts one that warrants an enforcement action? This dissent is really…

You’re right, I agree, I’m more so glad that they are willing to use this as a place to point out other unanswered questions and incongruencies in SEC actions

Re: SEC charges Impact Theory for unregistered offering of NFTs

#100
post #3

Its great to see commissioner Mark T Uyeda also dissenting, because for some time it was only Hester Pierce that would take these views on digital assets, and for her views to be elevated to head commissioner it requires a Republican President to make that nomination, as she is Republican. There are many people that are not Republican that would aim to get her appointed and do whatever it takes. Which means casting a…

You're living in an alternate reality if you think the leadership of the SEC will move the needle on the election.
Post reply on HN