But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
At Thursday's Yahoo Finance summit on cryptocurrency, the director of the SEC's Division of Corporation Finance, William Hinman, delivered remarks[1] entitled "Digital Asset Transactions: When Howey Met Gary (Plastic)." Today, some publications[2] latched[3] onto Hinman's statements regarding Ether, the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization (behind bitcoin).
"Putting aside the fundraising that accompanied the creation of Ether, based on my understanding of the present state of Ether, the Ethereum network and its decentralized structure, current offers and sales of Ether are not securities transactions," he said. "And, as with Bitcoin, applying the disclosure regime of the federal securities laws to current transactions in Ether would seem to add little value."
The director's stance may generally signal how the nation's stock market regulator decides to approach oversight and enforcement issues related to Ether, the native tokens of the Ethereum network. Unfortunately, his commentary on Ether was limited to a single paragraph, and he didn't explain why he arrived at these conclusions. So, as observers, we're left with a bevy of questions.
For instance, what does the director perceive as the Ethereum Foundation's ongoing role in the development of the Ethereum network? Does his attitude toward Ethereum also apply to Ethereum Classic[4]?
Furthermore, does the planned shift from PoW to PoS change anything in his analysis? Has he considered the Foundation's own Ether holdings (or those of the most prominent Ethereum developers)?
All told, it's unclear how the commission might measure "decentralization."
Is it based on the number of developers with commit access? The number of nodes? The validation schema?
Even though Hinman said that other decentralized networks could arise (and not
