ICO, full name Initial Coin Offering, adapted from the initial public Securities Offering (initial public offering)
In essence, ICO is also a "public issue", just to turn the issued subject matter from securities into digital encryption currencies.Here, there is no strict one, The distinction between the secondary market, One up on any of the items can be crowd-funding or to sell, Such as the completion of product development at once in the circulation of each are big bourse transactions.
For this "new normal", the old player have been familiar with the first pot of gold.But the legal supervision is still in a serious lag stage, and the high-level people in the temple have not yet been able to get to the front line of the grass roots to understand this new thing.For the present situation of the law of touch with reality.
I decided to make an analysis from the legal point of view after the deep observation.
1. The general classification of ICO in the law.
To analyze the legal problems of ICO, We must define the legal nature of the transaction, as well as the subject matter of the ICO, To keep them out of the scope of the concept of a specific law, on the basis of determining what the laws and regulations.
And if we once the in-depth review of the various ICO the details of the project, It can be found that between each of them and not exactly the same, but on behalf of several kinds of completely different assets or rights and interests (although they are reflected in the form of a certain number of tokens).In general, the current standard of ICO can be divided into the following categories:
1. virtual commodity
2. jus fruendi aut fructus certificate
3. fund share
4. company equity
2. virtual commodity specific introduction:
This is the largest share in the ICO market, with a visual of at least 70% of the ICO belonging to this category.Its core feature is:.
(1) The project development team in the development of a for the practical application of block-chain technology products (or distributed books and even more broadly decentralized self-organization (Decentralized Autonomous Organization));
(2) The product is usually built into the circulation of negotiable token to the public chains(and private chains, Union chain without built-in tokens as an internal incentive mechanism);
(3) the built-in token, which is used by the user to use the specific function of the product, will be consumed or otherwise transferred in the process of using the product;
(4) The tokens are not issued by any body, Acceptance or commitment to redeem (i.e., There is no subject on the tokens to assume obligations in addition to the quality assurance function other than money).
As to its legal nature, In accordance with the above-mentioned characteristics of the ICO project belongs to the products included in the scope of crowd-funding, Participants in the access token is the product returns, For a block-chain system (or some of) the use of the "voucher" (similar to the players in the playground, The casino can not be directly used in legal tender, and the need to use the tokens to play), the function of its core is the specific use of the tokens.
(1) To (3) determine the composition of a feature from a positive point of view the product key elements of the crowd-funding, As noted in paragraph (4) of the standard attribute from the opposite angle rule out crowd-funding in return for financial products.
For the quality of the product, the law is the most loose.Crowd-funding close to a large extent products and buying activities ahead of "payment", That is, users pay in advance to the producers, as the funds required for the development and fabrication of related products.In this process, the development team not only gained money in advance, but also gained a larger user group in advance, not to worry about the future of the product.The majority of countries or regions do not crowd-funding as the financial activities of the product, the loosely regulated, legal risk is low, unless the product itself is illegal products.Of course, such ICO in the token compared to the common product in return for crowd-funding in terms of products, Still there is a huge difference: Encrypted digital token is a high degree of standardization The transfer is extremely convenient electronic virtual goods, So like is very suitable for the collective trading through bidding at the same securities, as long as the list share of any exchange as soon as it has almost the equivalent of the super liquidity of securities; By comparison, the use of ordinary products to end-users (rather than for resale), therefore, it is difficult to generate the secondary market transactions, fluidity is very poor.
Taking into account the ICO the characteristics of the tokens of these classes of securities, Regulators in the future to develop some special restrictions on the crowd-funding ICO products not impossible, The most likely of which is to limit the flow of tokens in each are big bourse transactions (although digital encryption of tokens without borders leads to the supervision of any particular state is difficult to achieve The effect).It must be noted that Certain block-chain (distributed books) project purpose, purely for the sake of money And vote for the public to deliberate on a project to create a tokens of "non-necessity" to initiate crowd-funding, In fact, these "tokens" of the project only a few non-substantive use of the function of the system, while the non-essential.If Ripple also according to the definition of the majority of the block chain project (but in fact is not), Its built-in tokens XRP's pretty much a typical in examples of deliberately adding non-essential tokens within the system.For such projects, It was mainly speculative value and non-use value tokens, so if the regulatory authority finds that crowd-funding for illegal fund-raising rather than products, it is also not surprising.