🔵REASONABLE ICO REGULATIONS FROM SWITZERLAND
FINMA, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority, yesterday published guidelines explaining how existing financial legislation would be applied to ICO. The aim is to dispel uncertainty in the space and should allow investors and organisers alike to act with greater confidence.
Amidst the guidance, the Swiss regulators state that each ICO will be judged independently. There will be no “catch-all” regulation. They admit that “financial market law and regulation are not applicable to all ICOs”. Therefore the Swiss agency will consider the manner in which the tokens issued will be used when deciding which existing legislation should govern a coin offering.
➡️They define tokens in three ways: payment tokens, utility tokens, and asset tokens.
1️⃣Payment tokens have no other purpose other than to provide a means of payment. They do not interact with specific applications in any unique way. For the purposes of regulation, they must comply with existing anti-money laundering legislation. They will not be treated as securities.
2️⃣Utility tokens are intended to provide access to an application or service. There will be no regulation of these tokens. However, it seems unlikely that many pure utility tokens will exist.
3️⃣Asset tokens will fall under securities legislation. If a token provides dividends, it’s an asset token. Likewise, if it represents shares in a particular company. Asset tokens will also fall under civil law requirements.
FINMA clearly state that hybrid tokens can also exist. From the above guidelines, it appears that most of the existing tokens issued by ICO will fall under more than one of the classifications.
📈The regulations seem to have been well received in the cryptocurrency community. The price of most tokens and coins have been increasing since the document was released.
thanttunsoe
photo credit; google image