SEC Chairman Atkins: "Crypto is Job No. 1 Right Now"

SEC’s Atkins Sees Crypto Work With CFTC as ‘Job No. 1 Right Now’

Coordinating cryptocurrency rules is the top task for key Wall Street regulators, US Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Paul Atkins said Monday.

“Crypto is job No. 1 right now,” Atkins told reporters after a meeting between SEC and US Commodity Futures Trading Commission leadership focusing on areas where the two agencies can work together. The regulators have also called out prediction markets, perpetual futures, and 24/7 trading as areas ripe for agency coordination.

“We just want to make sure that the rule books are in sync, that we don’t have any risk of arbitrage between the two systems,” Atkins said.

Charlie Javice Sentenced to 85 Months in Prison for Fraud

Charlie Javice, who was convicted of fraud for providing fake customer lists to JPMorgan Chase while selling her start-up to the bank, was sentenced to 85 months in federal prison on Monday.

Federal prosecutors had requested 144 months after a jury found Ms. Javice guilty in March of three counts of fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit fraud.

Is suspending Jimmy Kimmel securities fraud?

A group of Disney investors is alleging that the company prioritized “improper political” considerations over the best interests of stockholders with its brief suspension of Jimmy Kimmel last week. […]

“There is a credible basis to suspect that the Board and executives may have breached their fiduciary duties of loyalty, care, and good faith by placing improper political or affiliate considerations above the best interests of the Company and its stockholders,” the lawyers wrote. […]

The main point that I want to make here is that this stuff is perfectly symmetrical. If Walt Disney Co. had not suspended Kimmel, (1) President Trump would have said mean things about it, (2) the stock would have gone down at some point (and up at other points!) and (3) some different collection of not-purely-economically-motivated shareholders would have hired lawyers to send Disney a letter like this. “There is a credible basis to suspect that the Board and executives may have breached their fiduciary duties of loyalty, care, and good faith by placing improper political or wokeness considerations above the best interests of the Company and its stockholders,” etc.; the letter would have been almost exactly the same.

Deep In: Statement on DoubleZero No-Action Letter

Today’s no-action letter from the Division of Corporation Finance concerning DoubleZero’s token distributions designed to facilitate the programmatic functioning of a decentralized physical infrastructure network (i.e., DePIN) offers an opportunity to reflect on how we, as regulators, can foster innovation without expanding our reach beyond what Congress has mandated. Congress created the Securities and Exchange Commission to oversee the securities markets, not to regulate all economic activity.

DePIN represents a novel way of organizing human behavior and capital resources. Rather than relying on centralized corporate structures to coordinate activity, DePIN projects enlist participants to provide real-world capabilities, such as storage, telecommunications bandwidth, mapping, or energy, through open and distributed peer-to-peer networks. To encourage participation, many of these projects distribute tokens tied to activity. The person who runs a node, provides storage, or shares bandwidth earns a reward. These tokens are neither shares of stock in a company, nor promises of profits from the managerial efforts of others. They are functional incentives designed to encourage infrastructure buildout.

DePIN projects are distinguishable from more traditional fundraising transactions where the now ubiquitous Howey Test may capture uncommon instruments that have the essential attributes of a security….