How will the SEC’s new Cyber Unit effect ICO offerings in the USA?

If you have seen some of the posts I make online about due diligence and my interest into crypto, you can be sure as I move deeper into the cryptocurrency world, that I am going in with my eyes wide open.

In the second from last quarter of 2017 alone, ICOs raised more than $1.3 billion for crypto  — around five times more than subsidizing brought through investment up in the blockchain space.
There were 200 ICO’s in 2017 and at least 1,100 ICO’s in play worldwide now. The majority will fail because most of these ICO’s are fraudulent ponzi schemes. Games are played.

The insiders are trading back and forth. It looks just like a penny stock pump and dump operation.
One company that made the news lately is Bitconnect. So many people got in. Mostly greedy Americans that were looking for easy money. It seemed too good to be true from its inception in January of 2017, and it was.

There were so many red flags. Promises of returns were made. It was run anonymously and as I look at it today, it looks more like an investment instrument, and that brings up the SEC.

The SEC’s new Cyber Unit is focused on misconduct involving distributed ledger technology and initial coin offerings, the spread of false information through electronic and social media, brokerage account takeovers, hacking to obtain nonpublic information, and threats to trading platforms.

The SEC also has a Distributed Ledger Technology Working Group that focuses on various emerging applications of distributed ledger technology in the financial industry.

This tells me that ICO’s based in the USA are going to be scrutinized and quite possibly, the SEC might see all ICO’s as an investment opportunity that falls within their domain of oversight. That would create new regulations and qualifications wherein the ICO would have to register. This would scare the scammers but the legit ICO’s would then become regulated and the whole point of having a worldwide cryptocurrency outside the international banking swamp would be moot.

And I see the SEC and the IRS sitting back in the weeds, letting the coin build value and at the point they go after any ICO, seizing its assets and leaving the coinholder with nothing.

Overseas ICOs rely on Americans being one of the most active investment groups even to the point of creating MLM network marketing groups to push or mine coins. An MLM should never be the reason to support a specific coin.

I am looking at a number of factors in choosing the ICO with the best chance of success, backed buy a REAL product, with team members I can vet and maybe even restricting sales of the coin in the USA. I am getting very close and will discuss in my next post.

I Am Ted