US District Judge Gonzalo Curiel of the Southern District of California declared yesterday that the Blockvest ICO is, in essence, not a security — or at the very least that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had failed to demonstrate that met the characteristics of a security under US law.
There are three important metrics involved in determining whether a token or financial product is indeed a security, dating back to a 1946 case, and the one that Judge Curiel decided was not satisfied was that investors had expected to make a profit on the tokens.