Original | Liu Jiaolian
BTC failed to recover to 60k overnight and fell back to 59k. Yesterday [“8.29 Teaching Chain Insider: Can BTC’s volume withstand the overwhelming wealth of the US dollar’s easing cycle?”] mentioned that the US SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) sent a Wells Notice to the leading NFT platform Opensea , claiming that NFT is a security and threatening to sue Opensea and even the creators and publishers on the platform.
Speaking of the Wells Notice, those who have been in the circle for a while should be familiar with it. In the past cycle, the US SEC has sent this notice to countless crypto projects or companies. For example, according to the article "Two Boots Landed This Night" on April 11, 2024, the US SEC sent a Wells Notice to the leading DEX platform Uniswap on April 10, the first half of this year. For some introductions to the Wells Notice, friends who don't know can also click on the article "Two Boots Landed This Night" to read it briefly.
Later, Uniswap Labs, the company that developed Uniswap, published an open letter in response to the SEC. The title of the open letter is "The fight for DeFi continues". This was introduced in ["5.22 Teaching Chain Insider: BTC's ultimate success requires a multipolar world"].
The SEC may have good intentions in combating financial fraud, but SEC Chairman Gary Gensler may have forgotten that the road to hell is often paved with good intentions.
There are countless cases of the SEC attacking from all sides and suing crypto projects in the past Jiaolian internal references, so Jiaolian will not list them one by one here.
What Jiaolian wants to say in today's article is that the SEC under the leadership of Gary Gensler has indiscriminately applied all crypto assets to the old Securities Act and Securities Exchange Act of 1933 and 1934. Is this suspected of "lazy governance"?
Gary Gensler has repeatedly defended this highly conservative concept. There are two times that impressed me. One time was when he attended a hearing and insisted that crypto regulation should be based on the laws of 1933 and 1934, and there was no need to enact new laws. Another time was when Coinbase , a leading compliant exchange in the United States, sued the SEC. Coinbase believed that the old law was not suitable for regulating the current crypto market, but the SEC firmly denied it.
We can roughly understand the logic behind the SEC's view and the logic behind opposing it.
The logic supporting the SEC may be this: securities, whether written on paper with ink, printed on a typewriter, or even stored in a database in electronic form (most stocks today are already electronic), do not change their basic nature, that is, something classified as an "investment contract" under the Howey Howey Test. Today's so-called tokens or NFTs are just a change of name, with securities stored on the blockchain for issuance and circulation.
The logic against the SEC may be this: the object of law and regulation can only be the carrier or medium, not the payload or content. We feel that it is an illusion that regulation affects content. It is very simple. Content that may be illegal after being published on a public platform can exist in the mind without being punished, and even if you write it in a diary, it will not attract legal sanctions.
Therefore, the same information, written on paper is called a letter, typed into a computer is called an email, they must be managed in different ways. The same content, expressed and disseminated in the form of text is called a blog, expressed and disseminated in the form of audio and video is called a short video, they must also be managed in different ways. For the same amount of value, compared with the storage and circulation of fiat currency printed by the central bank, the storage and circulation of BTC mined from a decentralized system must inevitably explore different management methods. So now, no matter what the token represents, its medium and carrier is a new technology, the blockchain, so can it not be simply managed as securities in the 1933 law?
Otherwise, it would be like managing email according to postal standards, managing online blogs according to book publishing standards, and managing online ride-hailing services according to taxi standards. Can these innovations still flourish?
The current SEC has become a stumbling block on the development of the crypto industry and a huge mountain weighing on the crypto industry. Perhaps, 2024, as the year before the new bull market, will not be as lively and innovative as 2020, but unusually dull and lacking in novelty. Is this due to the SEC's wielding of a big stick and sending out legal "threatening letters" (Wells Notices) everywhere?
The results of the US election in November may bring some changes and hope in this regard.
The crypto industry needs to get behind the candidate who can remove Gary Gensler from office.
(Official account: Liu Jiaolian. Knowledge Planet: reply “Planet” to the official account)
(Disclaimer: The content of this article does not constitute any investment advice. Cryptocurrency is an extremely high-risk product and there is a risk of it returning to zero at any time. Please participate with caution and be responsible for your own actions.)
