Crypto-currency

Two Years of Crypto Market Memories

Capital Markets, Issuers, Law , , ,

I first looked at bitcoins in the Spring of 2017 because a friend asked me for my thoughts.  The price of a single bitcoin had run up sharply and the ICO craze was proceeding at full speed.   Up until that point I knew very little about either blockchain or cryptocurrency. 

I spoke with people who were actually developing blockchain projects for the big tech companies. I read a lot of articles which they thought would help me and a lot of other articles that I found through my own research. I spoke with traders, regulators, and with a lot of people who thought that they had cryptocurrency all sorted out.  There seemed to be a wide spectrum of thought about cryptocurrency, how it might be regulated (if at all) and whether it would augment or supplant the established financial order.  

I concluded that the bitcoin market was in a classic bubble, the price rising only because of hype, and the new money that hype always attracts. I was not alone in that opinion.  Still some intelligent sounding people were making an argument for continued price appreciation to ridiculous levels.  And that was what a lot of people wanted to hear. 

I wrote an article about my research, my thoughts and predictions for bitcoins.   https://laweconomicscapital.com/2017/06/the-bitcoin-bubble/   The article got the attention of a lot of people who were also trying to understand cryptocurrency and ICOs.

The article ends with an invitation to the securities lawyers who were writing the disclosure documents for ICOs to contact me for a professional conversation.  I would have had difficulty preparing those documents.  I confessed my professional curiosity to any and all that might satisfy it. 

A lot of lawyers and other professionals did contact me.  Many of the lawyers were doing what lawyers are supposed to do, marshaling the facts and applying the law as they saw it.  But it was clear that there was not a unified position as to what the facts regarding any cryptocurrency actually were. 

Some lawyers approached ICOs as if they were issuing securities and some as if they were issuing anything but securities.  Before the SEC issued its DAO Report, (July 2017) I was of the mind that a token offering might be structured so as not to be a security. Once the DAO Report was issued, it was clear to me that the SEC saw tokens as securities and would look at an ICO as the sale of securities with all that entailed.

The DAO Report led to a robust discussion, on line and off, with those same lawyers and professionals and more.  The discussion became somewhat convoluted as many non-lawyers often in other countries felt comfortable discussing the finer points of US securities law. A great many of those commentators had interesting takes on the Howey decision that no competent US lawyer would ever present to a judge.  Many of those “experts” just ignored the dozens of other cases cited by the SEC in the DAO Report and many other cases that should have been germane to the discussion. 

There was an interesting undercurrent of lawlessness in the cryptocurrency world.  It was impossible to search for articles about cryptocurrency without coming across many quoting regulators around the world who were reporting cases of money laundering and fraud.  That has not changed.  Fans of cryptocurrency were often happy to ignore these transgressions even though it was obvious that regulators would not.

By now I have read several hundred white papers for ICOs. Some were written by lawyers; other white papers were written by either monkeys or idiots. Some of the latter were using templates because the thought of actually hiring a lawyer to prepare documents for a multi-million dollar financing did not make sense to them.

These white papers are supposed to tell potential investors what they needed to know so they could make an informed decision whether or not to send their money.  That was rarely the case. I recall one white paper where the principals of the firm refused to disclose their last names. 

People were claiming to have advanced degrees they never completed and to have worked at firms where they were never employed.   Quite often, outrageous claims were made about the size of the market to be served and the profits to be made.  If these same founders had been sued by investors in a prior company for fraud, investors in this new company would never hear about it. 

I had my bio and picture hijacked and included in a white paper. So did many other people.  There was no way for any investors to know if what they were being told was true.  Very often, it wasn’t.

These ICOs were being sold by networks of unregulated, self-validating crypto “experts and advisors”.  They traveled in packs to frequent crypto conferences around the world.  They cross-validated each other in articles on websites that had popped up and which reached many thousands of people around the world. Some crypto “experts” developed 6 and 7 figure lists of social media followers.

An issuer could engage any number of these crypto gurus and just pay them in the tokens to be issued.   The “advisors” would notify their followers about the token sale and urge those followers to cough up real fiat money to buy them.  Along the way the advisors were selling tokens that they had gotten for nothing in exchange for their sales efforts.  

Several otherwise intelligent people tried to convince me that this was not just a dressed up pump and dump scheme playing out over and over again. The results were certainly the same because most people who bought the tokens in these ICOs were left holding the bag.

A significant number of the ICOs were out and out scams which, sadly, many people refused to see.  Fifty million dollars raised here; one hundred million there, all going down the toilet of financial history.  It got so bad that several of the large social media platforms banned ads for ICOs. Several countries banned the sale of ICOs altogether.

Many of the ICOs claimed that they were not selling securities but “utility” tokens instead.  That died down significantly after the SEC published its Cease and Desist v. Munchee toward the end of 2017.  https://laweconomicscapital.com/2017/12/sec-v-munchee-will-the-crypto-currency-community-listen/

Along the way some really bright lawyers thought that ICO offerings might be structured as SAFTS. I saw it as an attempt to solve a valuation problem by promising to set the value down the road.  They were touted as making the ICO market less risky. To me they looked to be a riskier “derivative” and began to write an article that said so. But I never finished that article. 

In short order one of the NYC laws schools published their research and pulled back the curtain on SAFTS. After that most securities lawyers stopped talking about them.  SAFTS were a financial flash in the pan and not a very good one at that.   

I also had conversations with a number of groups that wanted to develop a realistic scheme to regulate ICOs and cryptocurrency trading across borders.  Each failed because most of the participants had never worked at or had dealt with any market regulator.  I wrote e-mail after e-mail trying to explain that transparency is only useful if everyone in the market was honest and that without significant penalties for dishonesty no regulatory scheme can work.  All that fell on deaf ears and each of those groups disbanded.

I also spoke with several people who wanted to create trading platforms for cryptocurrency but most of whom had no idea what a trading platform does or how it operates.  I would ask questions like: What would be the minimum standards for listing on your trading platform?  It was apparent that they had not even worked out that simple, basic and necessary issue. When I asked about market-makers and liquidity I got a series of blank stares.

Today, at least in the US, most lawyers have accepted the fact that any ICO sold here will be the issuance of a security and that US securities laws will have to be followed.  

To sell securities to investors in the US the securities must be registered with the SEC or specifically exempt from the registration requirement.  Registration is an expensive and often lengthy process. By mid-to-late 2017 a number of lawyers were reporting that they were filing registration statements for ICO offerings with the SEC. Apparently, many never got approved.

Securities offerings in the US do not have to be registered if they comply with regulations which provide guidelines for un-registered offerings. Un-registered offerings are generally sold only to institutions and wealthier investors who have no real interest in owning crypto currency.  These unregistered securities are not intended to be traded.

More than one lawyer has reminded me in the last few months that unregistered securities can be transferred after 12 months if the company is putting financial information into the market or if the tokens are listed on a crypto exchange outside the US.  I am not certain that they have thought that idea through.

Investors in an unregistered offering in the US are usually required to attest to the fact that they are making a long term investment and not intending re-sale.  That is why most companies in the US that sell unregistered securities provide those investors with income from dividends or interest.   So if you are selling unregistered securities with the promise of liquidity and re-sale, you are likely to confuse everyone, except perhaps the judge who will ultimately set you straight.

Companies from around the world have always wanted to tap the US for capital investment.  It is often a difficult process for any company and especially for start-ups and smaller companies.  In the ICO market, it became apparent that political borders and local regulations were not considered to be important by the issuers.

Investors who should have seen the shoddy disclosures as a problem seemed happy to invest, convincing themselves that if the offering “complied” with the laws of the country of origin, then protections afforded to them by US law were unnecessary.   A lot of people who were touting blockchain because it was supposed to promote transparency were willing to invest in crypto offerings that provided none. 

Today, people are spending money to “tokenize” real estate, fine art and many other tangible items as if there was a market for those tokens or if it made any sense to create one.  If I can buy 1/10,000,000 of a Picasso, do I get to hang it over my fireplace for 20 minutes? 

If you are selling shares in a building that you call “tokens” and tell me that you believe that all of the laws pertaining to real estate syndications would not apply, I would suggest that you really need to re-think what you are doing.  There are established rules for selling “asset backed” securities in the US.  Not surprisingly, most of the articles I read about “tokenizing” this or that fail to mention those rules and most of the people with who I am now speaking who are preparing to “tokenize” this or that offerings do not seem to be considering them.

Back in 2017 a lot of regulators told me that the ICO boom came upon them suddenly and that they did not have the staff or budget to deal with them.  They do now and there is every indication that the leniency some regulators have exhibited is about to come to a screaming halt.  

BrightCOIN- The Legally Compliant ICO?

Capital Markets, Issuers, Law , , , ,

I recently read an article citing a study that concluded that as many as 81% of initial coin offerings (ICOs) are scams. Several people contested that number but it cannot be too far off. If you have more than a cursory interest in crypto currency and ICOs it is hard to miss all of the discussion about ICO scams and what to do about them.

There is a general consensus among many in the ICO community that the ICOs need to stop kidding themselves that they are not securities and begin to seriously comply with US securities laws.  In crypto industry parlance, there is an expectation that ICOs have begun to evolve into STOs (securities token offerings).

A company issuing a securities token will need to register the offering with the SEC or seek an exemption from registration such as Regulation D.  Most STOs will be sold under Reg. D,in part because the SEC has yet to approve a registered offering and does not seem to be in any hurry to do so. US securities laws require that investors be given full disclosure of the facts that they need to make an intelligent decision whether or not to invest.

Around the same time, I came across a discussion on LinkedIn about an ICO for a company called BrightCOIN. The company is raising between $1 and $40 million to expand its tech platform which enables companies to launch their ICO in a “legally compliant” manner.

I read the white paper which is anything but legally complaint and I said so on LinkedIn. This got some brush back by the company’s CEO who commented, among other things that the company had a great lawyer who had helped prepare the white paper.  The CEO claims to be a Y Combinator alumnus with several successful start-ups under his belt. So, of course, he should have an excellent lawyer.

I offered to explain why I thought that lawyer needed to go back to law school and the CEO scheduled two appointments with me so the lawyer could tell me that he was right and I was wrong. They cancelled both appointments at the last minute.

The ICO for BrightCOIN is intended to be a Reg. D offering. I would have thought that since it was selling a service and a platform where other companies can make “legally compliant” offerings, BrightCOIN would have taken pains to make its own offering “legally complaint”. They missed by a mile.

The BrightCOIN offering document is in what is now being called a “white paper format”.  If you look at a lot of ICOs, a great many use this format. I do not know where it originated, but it does not generally make the disclosures that are required for a Reg. D offering in the format that the SEC expects. Using this format is an invitation to the SEC, state regulators and class action lawyers to come after you.

A Reg.D offering is also called a private placement and the offering document is called a private placement memorandum (PPM). There is a reason that most PPMs look alike. Back in the 1980s and 1990s regulators in several states required hands on review of every offering. I personally spent hours on the phone with the staff at these various state agencies going over specific language in Reg. D offerings. They usually wanted additional disclaimers; more risk disclosures; the words “this is a speculative investment” in the cover page in bold.

Congress eventually took away the states’ ability to comment on these offerings; but a lot of lawyers, including me, appreciate that much of what they wanted amounted to good practice. Disclosures are made for the benefit of the company that is raising the money. They are a prophylactic against legal action claiming fraud and misrepresentation.

BrightCOIN calls itself the Kickstarter for ICOs.  It is essentially a crowdfunding platform for ICOs including those private placements offered under Reg. D and registered offerings filed under Reg. A+.  BrightCOIN charges no upfront fees and will provide everything that a company needs to prepare and launch an ICO including “audited documentation”.

Of course Kickstarter does not handle any securities offerings. They operate in the world of “rewards based crowdfunding”, not securities crowdfunding, so the comparison to Kickstarter that BrightCOIN makes in its ICO white paper is meaningless.

Elsewhere BrightCOIN claims that it will become the “next Goldman Sachs” and compares itself to Goldman, Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan.  The white paper included the logos for those companies, all of which I suspect are trademarked.

Did Merrill Lynch give permission for its trademark to be used in this offering? Does Goldman Sachs even know that BrightCOIN exists?  Is there any way to read this hyperbole and not consider it to be misleading?

BrightCOIN claims that its tech platform is valuable because an entrepreneur considering launching their own Reg. A+ or Reg. D offering in the form of a token might spend as much as $500,000 to have the tech built.  By “tech” it appears to be speaking about the crowdfunding platform that they are offering.

The last time I saw a bid to build a crowdfunding platform from scratch (November 2017) the cost was $50,000 and that had some unique CRM capabilities built in. I made a few calls and to add a token capability to that would cost no more than another $50,000 and probably a lot less. Where BrightCOIN gets that $500,000 number is anyone’s guess.

In any event there is no reason to create the crowdfunding technology from scratch. If you want to open your own crowdfunding platform there are several companies that offer white label products for a small upfront fee and even smaller monthly charge. At least one that I know of comes with AML/KYC capability attached.

For any offering of securities to be “compliant” it must present information in such a way that it is balanced to point that it is not misleading. The BrightCOIN white paper is full of interesting and unsubstantiated hyperbole.

Around the world, it appears that 10% of the funds that have been invested in ICOs have been hacked. BrightCOIN claims its platform is “100% hack proof”.  I have spoken with large, mainstream financial institutions that spend a lot of money making their platforms “hack-resistant” but I do not know a single attorney who would put the phrase “100% hack proof” in a securities offering document.  The truth is no one knows if a platform is hack proof until it happens.

The white paper discusses how BrightCOIN can be used to “tokenize” assets like real estate making those assets more accessible to small investors who will be able to trade those tokens on a global basis. The white paper notes (in bold type) that there are over $200 trillion worth of assets that can be tokenized.  In the context it is presented, that statement is akin to me saying that there are 1 million single women in California implying that I will always have a date on Saturday night.

BrightCOIN claims their platform is fully functional and that they are already in business. Do they disclose how many offerings they have done and how much money those offerings have raised? They do not. They also claim that they offer consulting services to help a company prepare and market its ICO. Do they identify the people who perform these services? No.

BrightCOIN estimates that it may be able to list and sell 20 ICOs per month and might be able to take in $6.5 million per month in “success fees” if it does. The lawyer who they claim prepared this offering and who was supposed to call me and explain it to me should have told them that unless the platform is a licensed broker/dealer “success fees” are forbidden.  No where does the white paper suggest that BrightCOIN intends to become a licensed broker/dealer.

People always ask me how is it that I can spot these scams when other people cannot.  In most cases, like here, they do not pass the simple “smell test”. The founder, in my opinion, should simply stop this offering until it is actually compliant. If not people at Y Combinator should pull him aside and ask that he stop using their name.

In my opinion, the attorney, if he actually wrote this offering, which I doubt, should go back to chasing ambulances.  When you prepare an offering of securities, it is expected that people will call up and ask some questions as part of their due diligence investigation. Any attorney, who agrees to field those questions, cancels two phone calls and makes no attempt to reschedule them, should refund the client’s money.

The entire ICO market has been one con after another. Telling investors the truth is not that difficult but it seems to be the one thing that the ICOs just cannot seem to do.

 

Crime and Crypto Currency

Capital Markets, Investors, Law , ,

Many people seem to think that crypto currency is a legitimate response to the “evils” visited upon the world by banks, Wall Street and other intermediaries.  They see the mainstream world of finance as corrupt and predatory. Many of these same people are confident that a decentralized system of crypto currency will be more transparent and therefore will reduce the bad acts and eliminate the bad actors.

The same old scams that these crypto enthusiasts hate are playing out in the crypto market every day.  It is actually easier to scam people in the crypto market because both the players and the investors are remarkably naïve.

There has always been crime and criminals in the financial markets.  Some of the same scams have played out over and over for more than 100 years.  The perpetrators and the technology change but at their core many of the scams are the same. The scams succeed because the one fact that never changes is that investors can be both greedy and stupid.  But that fact does not excuse anyone who lies to investors or takes advantage of investors’ stupidity.

Regulation came to the capital markets in the first decade of the last century in the form of “blue sky” laws that were passed by various states.  They were called blue sky laws because they sought to put an end to “speculative schemes which have no more basis than so many feet of blue sky”.  Or more succinctly “to stop the sale of stock in fly-by-night concerns, visionary oil wells, distant gold mines and other fraudulent exploitations.”  Those laws still exist today and were enveloped in a series of federal anti-fraud laws in the 1930s.

I invite you to read the white papers for ten Initial Coin offerings (ICOs). Pick any ten at random. What you will find are the same “fly-by-night” companies that claim that they are going to disrupt this or that multibillion-dollar industry without so much as a bookkeeper on staff.   Almost every white paper I read clearly violates both state and federal law because they do not make full and accurate disclosures. That is why US regulators are perpetually busy issuing injunctions to stop ICOs in their tracks.

In many cases the ICOs are trying to convince themselves that they are not offering securities so they do not have to make the required disclosures.  In some of these cases it is because accurate disclosures would sink the offering.  It is hard to find even simple disclosures like “there are other, larger and better financed companies in this market with whom we will have to compete”.

In other cases, the companies claim to be domiciled in other countries and are not subject to US laws.  I get several e-mails a week soliciting my investment in an ICO domiciled in another country.  Of course if you are soliciting investment from US citizens, then US law applies.

The ICO industry does not acknowledge that it needs to play by the rules. It calls the rules old fashioned and out of date for the modern global economy.  But those rules still apply and failure to follow them is often criminal conduct.

An ICO is an off-shoot of equity crowdfunding or direct to investor financing that uses the internet rather than a brokerage firm to reach potential investors.  Equity crowdfunding was billed as an inexpensive way for small companies to have access to investors.

In the mainstream markets a brokerage firm will conduct a due diligence investigation of the company seeking financing.  The purpose of a due diligence investigation is to have a professional verify the information that is being given to potential investors. This protects investors from the most obvious scoundrels.

With a few exceptions the crowdfunding industry never bought into the idea of due diligence and many of the worst crowdfunding platforms and crowdfunding “advisors” make no serious attempt to verify whether any of the information given to investors is in fact true. The worst of the crowdfunding platforms and advisors have seamlessly moved into the ICO market.

The ICO community suggests that investors conduct their own due diligence investigations.  How, exactly, does a small investor thinking about investing in an IC0 which claims to have a new complex technology and a management team spread over 5 countries “investigate” the offering? Did the management actually graduate from the schools they claim and work at the companies they list? Are the advisors that are listed actually participating? Does the tech violate someone else’s patent? Is the potential market really as big as they say it is? Who are the competitors and how are they positioned in the market?

The ICO market is a market where telling investors the truth is the exception rather than the rule.  In my thinking, every person who sells tokens in an ICO without telling investors all the material facts is a criminal.  And that describes the bulk of the ICO market and ICO advisors.

After the tech market collapsed in 2001 it was revealed that many of the research analysts at the large Wall Street firms had conflicts of interest. Keeping the large tech companies happy meant a lot of investment banking fees for the firms. That is just what the analysts did; they said nice things about the long term growth prospects of companies that were a step away from bankruptcy.  This type of behavior is also clearly illegal.

It is absurdly easy to purchase a good rating for an ICO. Advisors on one of the largest ICO rating platforms, ICO Bench, sell good ratings to any ICO that wants to pay for one.  A pay-for-play rating violates many laws.  Many people in the ICO industry are aware of the practice and keep their mouths shut. In my mind, any rating by ICO Bench is a scam and ICOs that use an advisor affiliated with ICO Bench should be avoided at all costs.

I recently read an article by Jordan Belfort whose antics were portrayed as the Wolf of Wall Street.  Belfort is no fan of crypto currency but he is an expert on pump and dump schemes. What he sees when he looks at an ICO is a lot of insiders and advisors getting a lot of cheap tokens before the public gets any. The insiders then loudly hype the company and dump their tokens on the unsuspecting public. It is exactly the same method that Belfort used and he landed in jail for doing it.

If you follow the Bitcoin trading market it is impossible to avoid repeated allegations of market manipulation. Crypto enthusiasts are always writing articles claiming that the price moved up or down because some “whale” took a large position or dumped one.  No one knows for certain because the crypto currency world is anything but transparent. Many of these people write articles claiming that some large investor has “blessed” crypto currency or is making a sizeable investment. They repeat every unsubstantiated positive rumor while ignoring the reality that the rumor they spread last month never came true.

That there is real crime in the crypto world is evidenced by theft and money laundering.  More than $1 billion has apparently been stolen from electronic wallets and crypto exchanges.  Banks spend a small fortune on technology to keep their accounts un-hackable. The crypto world which is based in technology cannot seem to get its act together.

Likewise, governments all over the world are constantly reporting that money laundering by drug cartels, human traffickers and the like are a significant problem. The FBI recently reported that they have 130 active investigations concerning money laundering and crypto currency. Governments in other countries have many more investigations under way.

In response, the crypto world always says that a lot more money is laundered through banks than with crypto. That logic is very similar to saying that you can get food poisoning at any restaurant, so why should we make our employees wash their hands.  Again banks spend a lot of money on anti-money laundering protocols even if they are not perfect.  Most of the crypto exchanges spend little or nothing.

Organized crime has been active on Wall Street for decades. The NY State Attorney General did a study back in the 1990s that concluded that organized crime was operating smaller brokerage firms that were foisting pump and dump schemes to unsuspecting investors.

A few weeks back someone sent me the prospectus for an ICO that had filed for registration as a Reg. A offering.  The company is just a lawyer who is going to raise $50 million and then hire developers to create Blockchain based projects for this industry or that.

It was a vanilla offering, more akin to a shell than a company; the kind of shell commonly used for pumps and dump schemes. The lawyer has actually represented small brokerage firms that have been accused of pump and dump schemes and also people associated with organized crime families. How do I know?  I “googled” the lawyer’s name and that is what I found.  So why would a lawyer who has ties to organized crime register a shell?  If you do not know the obvious answer, you have no business calling yourself a crypto “expert”.

Everyone I speak with in the crypto world is confident that it will continue to expand and that more and more investors will be drawn to it.  But that will remain a myth unless and until investors are always told the truth about ICOs and their secondary markets. It will remain a myth until the honest people in the industry are prepared to start publishing articles about advisors listed on ICO Bench and other ICO charlatans and stop inviting them to speak at conference after conference.  It will remain a myth until the platforms spend what it takes to become as secure as banks, so that the tokens they hold for investors cannot be stolen and the trading platforms can identify and refuse to deal with the drug dealers and human traffickers.

Do I think any of this will happen? Not a chance. Within hours of the time I publish this article I will begin to get e-mails from people who will tell me that either 1) the regulations or protocols I seek will act to centralize a market that is supposed to be decentralized; or 2) decentralization and Blockchain will fix all these problems; or 3) I am too old to understand modern technology or the “new” world of finance. In the meantime the crypto market will continue to be a cesspool of criminals and criminal acts; the very conduct its backers detest in the mainstream markets.

 

Bitcoins, BS and Banking

Capital Markets , ,

I do not believe in Bitcoins because the whole idea behind them smacks of alchemy. For centuries, going back to classical Greece, people believed they could turn lead into gold. A great many, otherwise intelligent people spent a lot of time in this pursuit from the Middle Ages into the 20th Century.

In the latter half of the 19th Century people believed that the new Industrial Age would come up with a mechanical contraption to solve every problem. There were people peddling mechanical contraptions which claimed that you could put a lead bar in one end and a gold bar would come out the other. The process or internal workings of the machine were not disclosed and they became known generically as “black boxes”.

Today, thanks to new technology, you can buy a machine, plug it in and every so often it will send a few lines of computer code to an electronic wallet. You can then exchange that code for a lot of cold hard cash.  That is exactly what a Bitcoin is, just computer code that can be replicated by a machine. They may have value today; but sooner or later those lines of computer code are more likely than not, to become worthless.

For these lines of code to retain value people must be willing to buy them after they are manufactured. As the price increases, more and more people will likely start manufacturing them especially if the next generation of machines are more efficient or cost less.  Sooner or later there will be more code in the market than the market wants and the price will drop. That of course is just basic economics.

Basic economics is something that is often absent from any discussion about crypto-currency. It seems that many people who support crypto-currency, who are passionate about it and who are absolutely certain that it will prevail and disrupt the world are people who have technical backgrounds.  Some of those who are most adamant in the defense of crypto-currency have backgrounds in totally unrelated fields. They gained their insight into finance by having a credit card or reading economic theory in magazine or blog articles.

Most economists, including a Nobel Prize winner or two and most people who have worked in finance or banking dismiss crypto-currency as a fad.  On more than one occasion, a negative pronouncement by someone with stature in economics or finance has led to the crypto-enthusiasts mocking economics, economists and anyone who has worked in finance.  More than one has suggested that I and others are just too old to understand the new Blockchain technology that forms the underlying platform for crypto-currency.

Blockchain is essentially a decentralized ledger. It is a method of bookkeeping where each participant to a transaction creates a record of the transaction which is matched and verified with the other participants to the transaction.

When I wanted to learn about Blockchain I spoke with people who are working in Blockchain at large companies and universities in the US and around the world.  What they told me is that we may see Blockchain coming into various industries in the next few years. Initially they expect that it will be used in supply chain and logistics applications.

What I do not hear from these same people is a lot of enthusiasm for Blockchain in the financial sector.  FINRA assembled a panel of Blockchain experts in 2016 that looked at various functions in the financial markets that might be made more efficient by Blockchain. The overall conclusion was that Blockchain development still had a way to go.

There will certainly be decentralized ledgers within various financial companies and for some financial tasks. The entire world of finance is based upon checks and balances, supervision of employees, and repeated audits. Some of that has been automated since the 1970s.

The financial markets need to keep the bad actors out. Decentralization does not do that. If anything it is the opposite.  Blockchain verifies the transactions but not the people behind them.

A decentralized system prides itself on anonymity and anonymity invites bad actors.  If you read what the regulators of the banking and financial markets around the world have published, they continually share two main concerns about crypto-currency; money-laundering and tax avoidance.

Crypto-defenders will argue that far more money is laundered through banks. Banks spend a lot of money trying to curtail money laundering. The crypto-industry spends virtually nothing. The fact that there are other ways to launder money is no excuse for the creation of a new system that makes money laundering easier.

In the past few months banks, bankers, stockbrokers and serious investors have all given the thumbs down to crypto-currency. Recently the large credit card companies announced that their credit cards can no longer be used to purchase crypto-currencies. The largest stock brokerage firms will not purchase crypto-currency as an investment for their customers. Most professional investment advisors realize that they cannot purchase crypto-currency for their clients and satisfy their obligations as fiduciaries.

Part of the reason is that the crypto-currency industry itself cannot decide if crypto-currency is a security, commodity, currency or a whole new asset class. There is so much divergent opinion within the crypto-community that anyone who reads a few dozen articles on the subject is likely to be confused rather than enlightened.

Much of that divergent opinion is caused by the fact that these are legal definitions being interpreted by non-lawyers. I will not apologize for thinking an opinion written by a non-lawyer with a technical background living in Europe, Asia or Australia about how something should be defined under US law should carry little weight.

That does not stop the crypto-community from hanging on the word of every hack with a keyboard who holds himself out as a crypto-expert.  For an industry barely 2 years old, there are enough people holding themselves out as “crypto-experts” to fill Yankee Stadium at least once, perhaps more.

If all was well in crypto-land I would never have heard about Tether. Tether is a crypto-currency that is exchangeable into US currency at a fixed rate.  It claims to have a cash reserve of $2 billion to back up each and every Tether coin that has been issued.  People have questioned whether the owners of Tether really have secured $2 billion and the owners have repeatedly refused to respond with simple proof that the $2 billion is there. In any legitimate industry this question would never have to be asked more than once.

Theft and fraud are rampant in the crypto-currency world.  Electronic wallets are routinely hacked. Estimates run as high as 10% of the money sent to ICOs may have been hacked from the ICO’s wallet and hundreds of millions of dollars have been stolen from the various secondary market exchanges where the crypto-currency is traded.

Fund raising using crypto-currency (ICOs) has reached a fever pitch and has attracted a significant amount of scoundrels. Very few ICOs fund projects that are worthwhile ventures and most cannot be considered worthwhile investments by any stretch of the imagination. Telling the whole truth about the venture being financed is becoming the exception rather than the rule. Following existing laws regarding investment offerings is an anathema to the crypto-industry.

On more than one occasion an ICO has listed someone as an advisor who has never heard of the company or never agreed to be an advisor. I know this to be true because a few months back someone alerted me that my picture had been included in an ICO offering even though I had not given permission for the company to include it. This actually happens way too often.

There was actually one ICO that was so brazen that the people behind it raised a few million dollars and then took down their website leaving only the picture of a phallic symbol. The people who invested in this ICO got the shaft in more ways than one.

What I find most ridiculous about crypto-currency advocates is their overwhelming dislike for banks and their absolute but incorrect belief that crypto-currency and Blockchain will replace banks and send them to the rubbish heap of history.

Some of these people are European based Socialists who have always hated banks, which is their prerogative. But they have unsuccessfully been trying to supplant banks since the French Revolution. Blockchain is not going to help them.

Other people hate banks because they assert, incorrectly, that banks were the cause of the stock market crash in 2008.  I do not know of a single instance of a bank putting a gun to someone’s head and making them take out a loan that they could not afford to repay. The real estate bubble that preceded the crash might better be laid at the feet of the thousands of real estate brokers who encouraged people to buy homes with the foolish notion that real estate always goes up in value.

The most vocal group of bank haters seems to be millennials who have very little experience dealing with banks, but who constantly tell me that they do not trust them. They tell me that banks charge too much and that the world needs better platforms to make payments.

A payment platform like PayPal works quite well and is a big step up from the way banking worked 20 years ago. All it actually does is move money from my bank to a vendor’s bank quickly. Blockchain may make these payments systems better and faster.

I think these advocates will be disappointed to find that banks will ultimately take the best Blockchain has to offer and utilize it in such a way as to fire significant numbers of employees and make more money. Blockchain may actually strengthen the banking industry rather than displace it.

The problem with the idea that crypto-currencies will replace banks is that banks do a lot more than just facilitate payments. The primary function of banks is to aggregate and intermediate capital.  Banks take deposits from a lot of people and use the funds to make loans to small businesses and to make mortgage loans to homeowners.  The consumer side of these transactions can be done with a peer-to-peer approach and an app. You can apply for a small loan or a mortgage from your smart phone, but you are still borrowing from a pool of money held at a bank.

Banks also make large loans. On any given day General Motors or Dow Chemical may float a bond issue to borrow a few hundred million dollars. On the same day the State of New York may float a bond issue to fund a highway or bridge project or new university dormitory. There may be a hundred or more of these large loans and bond financings taking place around the world every day.

It is not likely that these large complicated financings will ever be done with an app on a smart phone.  These bonds are sold to syndicates of commercial banks. This requires that capital be pooled and that large entities have control over those pools of capital. Bank depositors do not decide how the bank invests the money they deposit.

This is the antithesis of the decentralized world envisioned by crypto-enthusiasts. In their world, the crypto-currency is held in electronic wallets over which only the owner has control.  No banks or centralized entity has access to those crypto-funds. There are no banks or similar entities to pool those funds and make the large loans upon which the global economy depends.

Crypto-enthusiasts have no answer to how these large loans might be made in a decentralized financial world. They do not care that banks evolved to where they are because of the need for large loans to fund large companies and large projects.

The US capital market is not a stodgy outdated system screaming for reform. It is a large, dynamic system that handles trillions of dollars of transactions every day. Virtually every transaction settles with every party happy.

It is way past time for the Blockchain industry to leave crypto-currency and the bank-haters behind and to focus on the applications for Blockchain in existing financial institutions and other industries.

 

 

 

 

SEC v. Munchee – Will the crypto-currency community listen?

Capital Markets, Issuers, Law , , , ,

 Just about 2 years ago I wrote a blog article about the first Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcement action involving equity crowdfunding, SEC. v. Ascenergy.  The SEC action against Ascenergy highlighted the need for the crowdfunding industry to step up and protect the investors from fraud.  That made good common sense because the crowdfunding industry needs investors to survive.

Notwithstanding, most of the crowdfunding industry ignored that enforcement action.  It still largely refuses to carefully vet the offerings that are put on the platforms for investors’ consideration or conduct meaningful due diligence to verify that what the companies are telling investors is true.

Recently the SEC brought what is considered its first action against an Initial Coin Offering (ICO), SEC. v. Munchee Inc.  An ICO is essentially a sub-set of crowdfunding and each offering should be governed by the JOBS Act and the anti-fraud provisions of the securities laws.

A lot of people in the ICO industry will disagree because they believe that they can construct an ICO offering that is not selling securities. The SEC has been clear that it has not seen an ICO that was not a securities offering. Most good securities lawyers agree with the SEC.

Accepting that simple truth would put many people in the ICO industry out of business.  I am referring to the many ICO consultants who charge a lot of money for bad advice. Some of the people who advised Munchee are well known in the crypto industry. Anyone want to bet that they will never mention their participation in the failed, non-compliant and illegal Munchee offering when someone asks about their track record?

On the same day as it announced the Munchee Cease and Desist Order, SEC Commissioner Jay Clayton issued a statement about how the Commission will likely view ICOs. Much of the commentary since has focused on the Commissioner’s statement and not on the enforcement action. That is a mistake.

The Commissioner’s statement covers more ground and speaks in somewhat general terms. It represents the view of the most important regulator in the ICO world, but it is still a statement about generalities that is open to some interpretation.

The enforcement action actually gives more of the “meat” of what the SEC deems illegal conduct. A cease and desist order may become the subject of litigation or appeal. The SEC staff tends to choose its words carefully. It sets forth the facts and the offending conduct, the jurisdictional basis for the action and the reasons why the conduct violates the law.  It is a road map of how not to conduct an ICO offering and everything in it should be scrutinized carefully.

So what, exactly, did Munchee do wrong?

Munchee claimed it was offering “utility” tokens and not securities. It claimed to have performed an analysis of the offering using the test denoted in SEC v. Howey case. I suspect that it did not.  The Munchee white paper lists a dozen officers and advisors not one of whom is an attorney. It provides links to a half dozen PR pieces about the offering but not the attorney’s analysis that these tokens were not securities. The failure to provide a copy of that evaluation was not lost on the SEC staff. They mention that fact specifically in the order.

If an attorney had done the analysis Munchee would set forth the attorney’s name or provided a copy of the evaluation. “Advice of counsel” can be a defense to an SEC action such as this one and Munchee declined to set forth that defense.

A lot of people claim to understand Howey and a lot of articles have been written by people who are not qualified securities lawyers and are claiming to explain it. An evaluation of the offering under the Howey test involves a lot more than just reviewing Howey.

The Order in Munchee refers to Howey and also the SEC’s July 2017 Dao Report.  That report reviews over 30 other cases that have applied the Howey test to various investment offerings. The Order specifically refers to several of those cases which are important to any discussion of this subject.

A lot of people seem to think that if you can use the token for some commercial purpose it is a “utility” token. The Order in Munchee should dispel that idea once and for all.

Purchasers of a Munchee token (MUN) would join a network of people writing reviews of various restaurants. Munchee would pay users in MUN for writing the reviews and would sell both advertising to restaurants and “in app” purchases to app users in exchange for MUN tokens.

Munchee also said it would work with restaurant owners so diners could buy food with MUN tokens and so that restaurant owners could reward app users–perhaps those who visited the restaurant or reviewed their meal in MUN tokens. As a result, MUN tokens would increase in value.

Howey defines a security as an investment premised on a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the entrepreneurial or managerial efforts of others. The argument here might have been that MUN owners might get a profit based upon their own efforts.

But Munchee intended to do much more. It intended to cut off the number of MUN at a fixed amount.  It intended to facilitate a secondary market where people could buy and sell MUN. Because you could buy MUN, not use them or do anything and later sell your MUN for an appreciated price, it should be abundantly clear that your expectation of profits had nothing to do with you and must therefore be derived from the efforts of others.

Let me offer a simple example: You can purchase a membership in COSTCO. The membership allows you to shop in their stores and buy goods in bulk at a discount. You also get free snacks and inexpensive hot dogs. The membership is recorded on the company’s records and you get an ID card with your picture that is checked every time you enter the store so it cannot be transferred to anyone else.  No one would think that a COSTCO membership is a security. But the SEC has declared some other memberships to be securities.

If COSTCO decided to cut off the number of memberships and allow them to be transferred, it might be fair to assume that the price would appreciate. That alone might make them into securities. Transferability, or the lack of it, is not itself the only indicator. A lot of unregistered securities cannot be freely transferred. But once your token can be transferred at a potentially appreciated price, you should certainly consider that you have crossed the line.

The other big issue raised by the SEC staff in the Munchee Order was the way in which the MUN were sold. Munchee posted information about the offering and the MUN White Paper through posts on the Munchee Website, and on a blog, Facebook, Twitter, and Bitcoin Talk.

This type of general solicitation is specifically permitted by the JOBS Act and is the type of marketing that is needed when a company is trying to raise $15 million without a brokerage firm selling the securities for them. If Munchee had accepted the fact that these were securities, this would not have mattered as long as they did not exaggerate the facts or the potential return.

At the same time, Munchee did not advertise the offering of MUN tokens in restaurant industry media to reach restaurant owners and promote how MUN tokens might let them advertise in the future which is what you might expect if the tokens were being sold for their “utility”. The SEC staff picked up on that fact.

Instead, Munchee and its agents promoted the MUN token offering in forums aimed at people interested in investing in Bitcoin and other digital assets. Munchee made public statements or endorsed other people’s public statements that touted the opportunity to profit, not necessarily the opportunity to use the MUN.

The Order states: “MUN tokens were to be available for purchase by individuals in the United States and worldwide.”  It notes that Munchee intended to use “10% of the offering proceeds ($1.5 million) to make sure Munchee is compliant in all countries.” While that sounds fairly innocuous, as I said, the SEC staff chooses the language it puts into these orders carefully.

There are countries where no crypto-currency or tokens can be sold, so saying it can be sold “worldwide” indicates that the offering is a scam. In a securities offering, it is common for the offering materials to set forth the countries where the offering is being made.  Most telling is the fact that you need to be certain that you are “compliant” before you make the offering, not after. The Howey test does not apply anywhere except the US.

The simple truth is that I would have been happy to help this company raise $15 million for a lot less than $1.5 million in full compliance with securities laws. I would have advised them to sell stock in the company and then memberships separately. They would have had a successful offering and money to market and sell memberships at a lower, more reasonable price where many more people might have joined.

The lesson here should be obvious. If you are claiming to offer a utility token, demonstrate its utility and sell it to people who may want to use it. If you are seeking investors, then stop telling yourself you are not selling a security. Hire lawyers and comply with the rules.

The time, effort and expense that the founders of Munchee expended developing their app and their business, went nowhere.  With the JOBS Act the opportunity for funding a small business has never been greater. If you want money from investors, stay between the white lines.

Why the Panic of 1893 is Relevant Today

Economics , , ,

The difference between studying economics and economic history is simple. In the former you learn how markets work and how to work within markets. In economic history you study all the times that the markets failed to work, including the market crashes, depressions and panics. The latter are far more interesting.

When I was teaching economics I would throw in a discussion of a panic or depression just to keep the students awake.  A good financial panic can get and keep your attention in the same way that motorists will never fail to look at two cars parked along the side of the highway that have been involved in an accident.  The more damage to the cars, the more people just cannot look away.

I frequently discussed the Panic of 1893 because it was at the same time a relatively simple and complex affair.  It was the worst economic disaster in the US up to that time and it came at the end of a period of prosperity and expansion the likes of which the US had not previously seen.

The events that led up to the Panic of 1893 and the measures taken by the government to deal with it are all relevant today.  There was a lot being discussed back then that is still being discussed today.

A lot of people who favor crypto-currencies frequently tell me that our current financial system is flawed and doomed because of the crash in 2008. That our economy survived 1893 and was still around to crash in 2008 is an indication of the market’s resiliency.  The reforms that took  place in the century after 1893 only made the US financial system stronger.

During the period 1870-1890 the railroads opened the west and people moved onto the Great Plains.  Farmers, not the industrialists, were the foundation of the US economy and were apparently too busy farming to have children because the food supply actually grew faster than the population.  Wheat was the primary commodity and whether the farmers understood it or not, the price of wheat was very much determined by a global economy.

US farmers borrowed heavily to finance their own farming operations. As production went up, prices came down and the depressed prices made it difficult for them to pay back the banks that had lent them money.  The same was true of cotton farmers in the South. Cotton was a major cash crop both before and after the Civil War. By 1890 the price became depressed as growers in Egypt and India added more and more tonnage to the world markets.

Since the farmers could not sell their wheat or cotton, there was no need to ship it anywhere and railroad revenues also dried up. The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad went bankrupt as did the several other large railroads. All were big employers and unemployment started to climb.  Part of this was due to the fact that as the railroads had been building more and more track and added to capacity that outgrew their market.

A company called National United Cordage which made rope out of hemp also went bankrupt.  The company had sold bonds to finance its operation and used the money to try to corner the market on hemp.  National Cordage was the most actively traded stock on the New York Stock Exchange at the time until rumors that the company had over extended itself caused the lenders to call the bonds and the company collapsed.

As National Cordage and the railroads went under, the stock market became uneasy and crashed.  Somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 banks closed as did thousands of businesses and farms. Unemployment shot up.  By some counts as many as 50% of the able bodied men who had been working in factories in Ohio were out of work.

In 1890 there was a drought in Argentina which killed off the wheat crop. This should have been good for American farmers but was not, for reasons that few people saw coming.  Years later when there was a similar drought and famine in the Ukraine, Herbert Hoover engineered the purchase of wheat from US farmers and shipped it to Russia. That would have helped the farmers in 1893, but no one apparently had the foresight to come up with this solution until 30 years later.

The Argentinean farmers were largely financed by British and European banks. In order to obtain the investment, the banks in Argentina originally hired Baring Brothers, one of the oldest English merchant banks, to assist them.  When I was giving this lecture to my economics students in 1995-1996, Barings had just been put out of business by a single young trader on its derivatives desk in Singapore who had made huge bets with Baring’s money and lost.

Barings was a little smarter in the 1890s because at the same time it was steering its clients into Argentine bonds, it was also buying US treasury bonds which were backed by gold.  European investors, panicked by the losses in South America, began to cash in the US bonds and demand gold as repayment. Almost immediately the US gold reserves fell to 100 million ounces which, by law, they were not supposed to fall below. The government actually borrowed gold from JP Morgan to make up its deficit.

The US was in the midst of a decade long debate about fiat currency.  At the time, fiat meant anything that was not gold or convertible into gold. The primary alternative was silver and many economists disregarded it out of hand simply because it was not gold.  You can only imagine how an economist from in the 1890s would feel about Bitcoins as an alternative currency today.

In 1890 the Congress had passed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act which required the US to purchase silver from mines in Western states. The idea was to deflate that value of US currency so that farmers could re-pay banks with currency that was worth less than it was when they borrowed it.

This encouraged silver mining and an over-supply of silver which helped to reduce the price of silver in the marketplace. It actually got to the point where a $1 Morgan silver coin had only about $.60 worth of silver in it.

The Silver Purchase Act was passed in conjunction with the McKinley Tariff, a very protectionist law that caused taxes on imports to rise dramatically and prices on many common goods to increase.  Certain protected industries such as wool and tin plates did well but overall prices went up for ordinary consumers.

At the time tariffs were the primary source of tax revenue for the US Government because the income tax had not yet been enacted. Tariffs were taxes that impacted small people buying common goods and aided the rich industrialists whose businesses were protected.

One of the interesting things about the Panic of 1893 is that it happened very quickly.  The railroads filed for bankruptcy, the banks closed and the stock market crashed all in a period of about 10 weeks. It led to several years of a deep depression.

Just prior to the 1893 collapse there had been a growing Populist movement that supported an agrarian economy and chastised Eastern elites, banks, railroad interests and gold. The Panic should have helped their cause, but did not. The Populists won 5 states in the Presidential election of 1892 and 9 seats in the House of Representatives in 1894 but had largely faded away by the end of the decade.

Not much in the way of reforms came out of this Panic but it was not the last. The Federal Reserve Act followed the Panic of 1907 when a few hundred more banks failed and securities market regulation and the FDIC originated after the stock market crash in 1929.

What I personally find interesting is that the issues present in 1893, globalization of finance and trade, the over-extension of credit, over supply of commodities and services, droughts, tariffs and protectionism, fiat currency, railroads and transportation, Populism and regional politics and even hemp are still in the headlines and issues surrounding them still on the table.

The overriding lesson is that finance is about trust and value.  It took 100 years after this Panic and several subsequent panics until the phrase “irrational exuberance” entered the economic lexicon but that phrase only explained what we should already have known.  The best lesson of 1893: “Do not build what you cannot use. Do not borrow what you cannot re-pay”.

 

Cannabis and Crypto-Currency-The Blind Leading the Blind

Capital Markets, Investors, Issuers , , ,

A few weeks back I wrote a blog article where I stated that I was not interested in preparing the legal paperwork for any company that was raising funds for a cannabis related company. In the same article I said that I would also decline the opportunity to prepare the paperwork for an initial coin offering (ICO).  Either would be lucrative for me but in both cases I saw significant problems for the investors.

I might have predicted that people would start sending me the paperwork for ICOs that were looking to fund cannabis businesses seeking my thoughts and comments. Two stick out as examples of how not to raise money for your cannabis business.

In July, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a report on ICOs. Crypto-currency is all the rage this year with some offerings raising millions of dollars in a matter of minutes and coins when issued quickly appreciating in price. Bitcoins for example have been appreciated significantly this year and some people think that Bitcoins are a legitimate investment, an assertion that is questionable at best.

The SEC correctly concluded that most crypto-currency offerings would fall within the definition of a security and thus its jurisdiction.  There was really no surprise as the SEC initiated about a dozen enforcement actions against crypto-currency issuers before it wrote its report.

Because an ICO is the offering of securities it is required by law to either 1) register with the SEC or 2) be exempt from registration assuming that an exemption is available. In either case, the issuer of the coins is required to give potential investors all the facts that would be material to making an investment decision.

If investors who purchased the coins got a discount on an ounce or two of marijuana the coins might not be securities. These two cannabis ICO offerings are clearly offering securities.  In both of these cases, investors profit if the underlying business profits which is more than enough for these to be securities and the SEC to have jurisdiction.

There are some facts which the SEC and any securities lawyer would consider to be material. This would include who is running the company; how much money is being raised and what will it be used for; the basic structure of the company’s ownership; how investors get paid and how much they might expect; an idea of the size of the market in which the company intends to compete and the names of the companies that are its major competitors.

Nothing really earth shattering,but the SEC has been reviewing offerings and ruling on how these facts are disclosed for decades. Making the disclosures correctly requires a fairly good idea of what the SEC expects and an equally good idea of the operation of the business offering the securities which is why securities lawyers who prepare offerings really have to know what we are doing.

The first cannabis ICO I looked at was for a company called Growers International.  Like all ICOs it uses a “White Paper” (which it prefers to call a “Green Paper”) instead of a traditional prospectus.  I doubt that it was prepared by a securities attorney. (I would suggest that you might add the words “Like, cool” or Yeah, man” between the sentences and it would read like the script of an old Cheech and Chong movie but I do not want to insult Cheech or Chong.)

From the Green Paper: “Q: Why should I trust the team? How do I know this isn’t a Pump & Dump situation?  A: We ask that all investors do their research on the people behind Growers International. Our lead developer has found success in both the cryptocurrency arena as well as in the cannabis industry. If there is any question regarding the legitimacy of the project, we encourage investors to reach out to Ryan (Lead Dev) personally on slack.”

It is always a good idea to research the people who are running any company into which you are making an investment.  In this case the “Green Paper” discloses the management to be: “Lead Developer: Ryan Wright (34, California / Taipei); Blockchain Programmer: Eddie E. (48, New Zealand); Web / API Developer: Michael J. (32, Maidenhead, England); Social Media Director: Devvie @Devnullius (40, Sweden); Community Coordinator: Jeremy Toman @MadHatt (37, Canada) who prefers the name ‘Tyler Dirden’ or ‘MadHatt’;Graphic Designer & Cryptocurrency Consultant: Chris S. @Elypse (26, Detroit); Community Manager: @DayVidd and Bitcointalk Manager & Financial Consultant: Dr. Charles @drcharles (26, USA).”

I suspect that if you contact Mr.Wright as suggested he will vouch for them all if he bothered to ask their last names. Do not bother to ask about Members of the Board of Directors as they have apparently not yet been appointed, so one Director might turn out to be Pablo@Escobar.

The other cannabis related ICO I reviewed is prepared more professionally but still, in my opinion, misses the mark by a good country mile. The company is called Paragon Coin, Inc. It is in the process of raising $100 million through the ICO. Just to be clear Paragon supports the cannabis industry, it does not appear that it intends to grow or distribute cannabis itself.

Paragon intends to bring block chain to the cannabis industry.  It intends to use a distributed ledger to bring order to this fragmented industry. According to the White Paper the company intends to “offer payment for industry related services and supplies through ParagonCoin; establish niche co-working spaces via ParagonSpace; organize and unite global legalization efforts through ParagonOnline; bring standardization of licensing, lab testing, transactions, supply chain and ID verification through apps built in ParagonAccelerator.”

All that is fair enough and the names and pictures of the operating personnel are included. Their education and work histories going back 10 years which I would have expected to see are not present.

The White Paper clearly notes that cannabis is not legal at the federal level and asserts that it will only operate in states where it is legal. This is the prime oxymoron of the cannabis industry.  Illegal at the federal level is illegal everywhere. Marijuana is a Schedule I drug and possession or sale is a felony in all 50 states. That is a fact about which that the cannabis industry does not want to think and largely ignores.

The Paragon White Paper describes one of the Risks of investing in its coin offering as follows:

CERTAIN ACTIVITIES INVOLVING MARIJUANA REMAIN ILLEGAL UNDER US FEDERAL

LAWS. SUCH ACTIVITIES INCLUDE BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO: (A) DISTRIBUTION OF MARIJUANA TO MINORS, (B) TRANSPORTING MARIJUANA FROM STATES WHERE IT IS LEGAL TO OTHER STATES, (C) DRUGGED DRIVING AND OTHER ADVERSE PUBLIC HEALTH CONSEQUENCES, (D) GROWING MARIJUANA ON PUBLIC LANDS, (E) MARIJUANA POSSESSION OR USE ON FEDERAL PROPERTY, AND

(F) OTHER CRIMINAL ACTIVITY OR VIOLENCE ASSOCIATED WITH THE SALE OF MARIJUANA. TO THE EXTENT THE COMPANY AND/OR PARAGON COIN, INC. MAY NOT PREVENT CERTAIN OF ITS USERS FROM USING PRG TOKENS IN VIOLATION OF US FEDERAL LAW, IT MAY SUBJECT THE COMPANY AND/OR PARAGON COIN, INC. TO CIVIL AND/OR CRIMINAL LIABILITY AND THE UTILITY, LIQUIDITY, AND/OR TRADING PRICE OF PRG TOKENS WILL BE ADVERSELY AFFECTED OR PRG TOKENS MAY CEASE TO BE TRADED.

This derives verbatim from the Cole Memorandum which was written in 2013 as a direction from the US Department of Justice to Federal prosecutors as to how they should allocate their resources when they decide who to prosecute and for what. It never made cannabis legal anywhere.

More importantly, the Cole Memo it is not an Act of Congress or Federal regulation and not binding on the current administration in any way. Any suggestion that it will continue to be followed under the current administration is wishful thinking given the Attorney General has repeatedly stated that it will not.

Medical marijuana has been legal in California for more than a decade. That did not stop the federal government from raiding and closing down a large medical dispensary in Oakland, CA in 2012. Parenthetically, Paragon’s initial co-working space is slated to open in Oakland, California.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this offering is that it intends to fund the use of block chain, a relatively unsecure distributed ledger to link the many growers and suppliers in the cannabis industry. If successful it may well deal a serious blow to the cannabis industry it is trying to support.

One of the leading ICO platforms, Coinbase, has been engaged in a two year battle with the Internal Revenue Service which wants a list of all the people who use its platform to trade Bitcoins. The IRS alleges that people are trading the coins profitably and not reporting the gains and paying the taxes. The US government has also alleged that drug cartels and other bad actors use crypto-currency to launder money.

If you are in the cannabis industry you have certainly heard stories of how the DEA would obtain the customer lists of hardware stores that sold supplies for hydroponic growing. Everyone who was a customer did not use these supplies to grow cannabis but the government used those lists to identify and prosecute people who did.

If you have a “decentralized” list of a large group of people who are on the list only because they are affirmatively in the cannabis business as Paragon wants to create, how long do you think it will take for the US Government to obtain it? Think that will be difficult because Paragon never touches any marijuana or sells it?

The CEO of Paragon, Jessica VerSteeg, is also CEO of AuBox which the White Paper describes as “an upscale marijuana delivery service in the SF Bay area”. That is more than enough “probable cause”for the DOJ to get its hands on Paragon’s distributed ledger and the names of every company that uses it. The icing on the cake will be when they tell the judge that the cannabis industry is full of drug cartels and money launders which, of course, it is.

When you write the risk factors for a securities offering, it is important to disclose all of the things that might reasonably occur.  Assuming that this ICO raises the $100 million that it seeks, it is certainly within the realm of possibility that the Attorney General might just seize that money under the federal asset forfeiture provisions. The people behind this offering somehow refuse to accept that there was an election last November and that there is a new sheriff in town.

What I took away from these two offerings was a sense that they were prepared by amateurs who were attempting to do something that was way over their head. In this current administration, raising money for a cannabis company waves a red flag in front of the US government. Compounding that fact by raising money through an ICO just increases the size of that red flag, exponentially.

I personally do not think that there is any hope for Green International but Paragon did not demonstrate that it needed $100 million and could have certainly raised a lesser, more reasonable amount in a more traditional fashion which is what I would have advised them to do if they had asked me.

 

 

Is Technology Changing Finance?

Capital Markets, Economics , , , , , , ,

A lot of people seem to believe that technology will fundamentally change or disrupt finance and the financial markets.  Many, if not most, of those people seem to be developing technology, selling it or using it to sell products to investors and financial consumers.  Most of these people seem to have degrees or backgrounds in technology not finance.

Having a background in technology does not give you an understanding of finance or the financial markets.  You cannot fix or disrupt what you do not understand and the lack of understanding behind many of these products is simply ridiculous.

I only write about the law and the financial markets. I spent my career as an attorney working in and around the financial markets. I also taught Economics and Finance so I have a pretty well rounded idea about how the capital markets work and how they are evolving.

So I feel perfectly justified to call out the many techies who think they understand the financial markets even though they have never worked in the markets or studied finance. Nonetheless many seem hell-bent to create products that they think are making these markets better and are quick to label the products that they sell as “disruptive”.

I call these people the “algorithms fix everything” crowd.  It is an interesting thought, except that these mathematicians have no math to back up much of what they say about finance.

At the same time, there is an ongoing narrative that suggests that everyone who works in the financial markets is evil. I find it amazing how many people actually think that all bankers and stock brokers get up in the morning thinking “who can I screw today?”  I have personally brought more than 1000 claims on behalf of aggrieved investors against Wall Street firms and written a book about some of the really bad things that Wall Street firms can do, but even I know that Wall Street firms are not evil.

The capital markets handle millions of transactions every day involving trillions of dollars and the almost all of those transactions settle with both the buyer and seller happy. Banks and stockbrokers fund schools, universities, roads and hospitals and virtually every company since WWII, again without serious problems or complaints from anyone. Banks aggregate and intermediate capital and over all they do it quite well.  So what, exactly, needs disrupting?

Still there is a never ending stream of new products and services which claim to be revolutionary and which promise to disrupt the capital markets. On closer examination many of these innovations are more hype than substance. Say what you will, there is nothing disruptive here.  A few examples for your consideration:

1) Algorithmic stock trading – This is a good place to start because it is pure technology applied to the existing markets. “Quant” traders use computers to evaluate trends and trading patterns in the market of various securities. They attempt to anticipate the price at which the next trade or subsequent trades will occur.  Logic says that computers should be able to take in more information that is pertinent to stock trading, analyze it almost instantaneously and execute transactions in micro seconds.

It sounds right, but the reality is that all stock trading is binary; every buyer requires a seller. No one buys a stock unless they believe that the price will appreciate; sellers generally will only sell shares when they think the price will appreciate no further. Both sides to any trade cannot be correct.

Analyzing the information or executing faster is of no use unless each trade you make is profitable.  No one has yet figured out how to accomplish that, nor are they likely to do so.  What we are talking about is predicting the future which is difficult to do even if only a micro-second or two ahead.   And please do not suggest that artificial intelligence will change this.  If there is one right answer based on the current information, e.g. buy APPL, then who is going to sell it?

2) Robo investment advisors- These are similar but much less sophisticated. Robo-advisors do not actually attempt to anticipate future market performance. They make investment recommendations based solely on the past performance of the markets. Anyone who has ever bought a mutual fund is required by law to be told that past performance is not a basis for future results. But that is all you get with a robo-advisor.

FINRA did a study of a half dozen robo investment platforms and found that they provided widely divergent portfolios for the same types of investors. No robo is any better than any other and none is really worth anything.

3) Crypto currency- It was a discussion about Bitcoins that was the initial impetus for this article. Aficionados of crypto currency actually think that they are developing an alternative currency for an alternative financial system. People seem to want to just print their own money and on one level I can understand that.  But that level is more of a fantasy than reality.

The reality is that I can buy food or virtually anything else in most places in the world with US currency. Why do we need Bitcoins? What exactly, is their utility?   When I ask that question I get any number of weak responses. More often than not, I get a tirade about banks and/or governments being evil.

What proponents of crypto currencies never want to face is the fact that the crypto currency market has been full of people laundering money from illegal activities.  The banks that crypto currency fans love to hate are required by law to know their customers and have systems in place to prevent money laundering.  It costs money to follow the law and have those systems. It is money that the crypto currency platforms do not want to spend. If there is a common thread in the crypto currency world, it is that people want to skirt or simply ignore the regulations that keep the markets safe and functioning.

4)  Crowdfunding Platforms- Crowdfunding clearly works and works well as evidenced by the significant amount of money that it has raised for real estate and real estate development projects.  At the same time the crowdfunding industry is populated by a great many people who fall into the “I do not care what the rules say, I am in this to make a buck” crowd.  I have written several articles about how some of the crowdfunding platforms do not take the time to properly verify the facts that they give to potential investors.  Due diligence can be expensive and some of the platforms just refuse to spend what it takes to do it correctly.

Crowdfunding replaces the role that stockbrokers typically fulfill in the process of raising capital with a website and do it yourself approach.  With a stockbroker, the company that was seeking capital got that money the vast majority of the time because the brokers were incentivized to sell the shares. With crowdfunding it is very much hit or miss whether the company will get funded. Many of the better crowdfunding platforms charge close to what a brokerage firm would charge and the investors get none of the protections or insurance that they would get with a stockbroker.

5) FinTech and FinApps – I can go to my bank’s website and send a payment to my electric utility company. I can do the same at the utility company’s website. I admit that it is convenient, but it is hardly disruptive.   Remittance companies like PayPal merely move money from my bank to a vendor’s bank.  And PayPal posted a $3 billion profit in the last fiscal quarter.  So they may charge less of a fee per transaction than a bank, but is not essentially different, and again while PayPal holds my money, I get no insurance against hacking or theft.

Apps that allow me to apply for a mortgage on my phone are really doing no more than eliminating a bank employee who would enter the same information from a written application into the bank’s computer. Again, it is convenient but not necessary.  And the money for the mortgage comes from either a bank or stock brokerage firm so there is nothing disruptive here, either.

Is there nothing truly new and disruptive in finance? Of course there is. They deservedly gave the 2006 Nobel Prize in Economics to Muhammad Yunus for developing a system of micro-finance that continues to create millions of entrepreneurs and lift millions more out of poverty. I doubt that one line of computer code was needed.

Micro-finance has the ability to put globalization on steroids.  Who will be disrupted?  Quite of few people with big school pedigrees and enormous student debt who write code to disrupt finance but who never understood finance in the first place.to

Classifying Crypto-Currency

Investors, Issuers, Law , ,

Is a Bitcoin a currency or a security?

This is a question that may interest only a small number of geeks and lawyers, but there is a lot of money already in the crypto-currency market and a lot more on the sidelines waiting to jump in if this question is answered satisfactorily.

The key concern is regulation especially if crypto-currencies are ruled to be securities. The securities markets are regulated in virtually every country and the penalties for issuing securities without following those regulations can be severe.

The history of crypto-currencies traces back to Bitcoins which were introduced in Japan in 2009. The coder who introduced them wanted Bitcoins to be considered to be a currency and used as such, hence the name “coins”.  Had he called them “Bitcode” many of the questions about what they are might never have been asked. At the same time much the market for Bitcoins might not have developed.

Part of the allure of crypto-currencies is the fact that some people see them as part of an alternative financial universe. These people seem to believe that crypto-currencies are part of a trend to replace traditional banks and banking.

Bitcoins store value and are a medium to exchange value,which are two prime attributes of currencies.  But having attributes of currencies does not make them currencies.  That point seems lost on many of the people who are insistent that Bitcoins and similar crypto-currencies are currencies. They are not.

Historically, most people who hated fiat currency preferred to use precious metals such as gold or silver for trade, although other commodities, most notably salt have been used over the centuries. But the simple fact is that fiat currencies work because they are almost universally accepted.

Proponents of crypto-currencies argue that they are becoming more and more accepted and that acceptance will increase.  But accepting crypto-currencies as an exchange of value will not make them currencies in the strictest sense. Salt, after all is just salt, no matter how it is used.

If we accept the fact that Bitcoins were mislabeled to give them the appearance that they were currency that is “mined” and kept in electronic “wallets” strictly is a marketing ploy we can free our thoughts for the real issue; are crypto-currencies a security?

The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has issued several Investor Alerts warning people to avoid investments and especially Ponzi Schemes that are funded by or which purchase Bitcoins and other crypto-currencies.  But the SEC has not come out and said the coins themselves are securities and that is significant.

The SEC has statutory jurisdiction over securities and the securities markets but not all investments are securities. Your home, for example, or other real estate can be a good investment, but is not a security. The same is true of gold bars or bullion; works of art or collectables and all commodities that trade on commodity exchanges.  All are investments, just not securities or the SEC’s problem.

I wrote a blog article about Bitcoins a few weeks back that got a lot more views than most of my articles because crypto-currency is a very hot topic. Several people forwarded legal opinions to me that specifically addressed the issue of whether or not crypto-currencies were a security.  Several of those legal opinions were written by excellent lawyers at excellent law firms. I was not really surprised to see that they reached opposite conclusions; some thought the coins were securities; some thought they were not.

Each of the opinions was interpreting one US Supreme Court case, SEC v. Howey, which basically defines a security as the “investment of money in a common enterprise with an expectation of profits predominantly from the efforts of others.” Law school students studying securities law spend a considerable amount of time with this case and later cases that applied it.  Any legal opinion asking the question “is this a security” will certainly review Howey and apply its reasoning to the facts at hand.

Personally, I do not think that the Howey test applies to crypto-currencies at all.

Let me take a step back and re-frame the question. If a crypto-currency is not a security, what is it?  I think that if a crypto-currency is clearly something other than a security, especially if it is something already regulated under different statutes, it should go a long way to settling the question. So what, exactly, are we dealing with?

Any crypto-currency is nothing more or less than multiple lines of computer code; a long string of ones and zeros.  Computer code is recognized by law as intellectual property which can be copyrighted and is covered by a substantial body of law both in the US and internationally. No one classifies computer code as a security.

The shares of Microsoft Corp. are a security, not the operating system that it sells. That distinction is why I believe that the coins themselves are not a security.

The last time that I heard so many securities lawyers asking the question “is this investment a security” was in the late 1970s.   At that time the marginal tax rate on the highest earners in the US was 50%-70%. If you earned over a certain amount you would pay one-half of the overage to the IRS.  Perhaps not surprisingly, there seemed to be a lot of doctors, business owners and entertainers with this problem.

An industry grew up to provide this group with a series of “tax sheltered” investments.  These transactions were intended to take advantage of IRS rules that provided tax credits and accelerated depreciation when certain physical items were purchased in a business context.  To qualify for the favorable tax treatment, the item purchased had to have a business purpose, be placed in service during the calendar year and not be a security.

In many cases leverage was employed. A doctor would put down $20,000 and sign an $80,000 non-recourse note for the item.  If the tax credit was 50% of the purchase price, then the doctor would save $50,000 from his tax bill for his $20,000 investment; more in subsequent years when he depreciated the value of his $100,000 item over time.

One of the more famous of these tax shelters was a company that sold lithographic masters of artwork from famous artists.  If you bought the master that had been created by an artist such as Andy Warhol, you might make 500 prints from the master before it wore out. If you could sell the lithographs for $200 a piece you could pay back your note, recoup your $20,000 down payment and still save $50,000 on your taxes.

If you sold those lithographs over a period of years, the price might fluctuate. A Warhol lithograph would likely at least retain its value and it could be exchanged for other works of art if you dealt with the right gallery or broker. That did not make the lithographs into a currency even though they had these key attributes of a currency.

Most of these investment programs came with an opinion letter written by a securities attorney that attested to the fact that selling a physical “item” did not involve the sale of securities because the sale did not satisfy the Howey test.  I wrote a few of those opinion letters back in the day because the law was pretty clear that a “thing” was not a security. As far as I can remember the SEC never brought a regulatory action against one of these investment programs taking the position that the items were securities.

The IRS did, however, take issue with a number of these tax sheltered investment programs. They disallowed the credits and deductions that the programs offered and ultimately changed its rules to close the loopholes.  The IRS is not bound to legal opinions and frequently judges the tax treatment of any investment long after the investment is made.

A key issue was whether you were buying a thing or a business. The same is true today. A coin offering might be a security if the coin owner receives a portion of the profits of that company when they purchase the coin.

The SEC is not bound by a legal opinion on the question “is this a security “.  As I said I read several opinions regarding crypto-currencies that went both ways, albeit on slightly different facts. What I did find surprising is that none of the opinion letters that I read, mentioned the fact that the IRS categorized crypto-currency tokens as “property”, not a “security” back in 2014.

The IRS’s classification is also not binding on the SEC.  But given the fact that the IRS had made this determination that the sale of a crypto-currency would be treated as property for tax purposes and the US Copyright Office will issue a copyright on computer code (but not on a stock certificate) I think any legal opinion regarding the classification of a crypto-currency under securities law should mention both.

Several of these opinions were rendered in connection with specific Initial Coin Offerings (ICO). Again this term is intended to create the look and feel of an initial public stock offering (IPO).  This is marketing and it is intended to create the impression (falsely) that an ICO is just like the offering of a security. Of course, if the SEC should assert that these ICOs were actually selling securities because they had the look and feel of securities and attempt to sanction the people behind them, these same people would be screaming that they did no such thing.

In most of the offerings that I reviewed, buying a coin in the ICO neither conferred ownership of the project nor did it promise any payments, so it would not be difficult to opine that all you were getting was a digital coin, not a security. If coin purchasers receive anything other than just the digital coin, then the issue gets murky.  Given that there have already been close to 1000 coin offerings, some very different from others, it can get very murky.

Just to be clear, this article is my opinion of a fairly new legal issue. It is not intended to be specific legal advice as regards one coin offering or another.

If someone came to me with a proposed ICO and sought my opinion I would probably counsel them as follows, just to keep them out of potential legal difficulty.

1) If you intend to use the proceeds of your coin offering to fund your new business then call the coins what they are: “Great New Tech Company Start-up Commemorative Digital Medallions”. This is just truth in packaging. Why call them coins or currency when they are not?

2) Account for the sale proceeds on your books as if you were selling any intellectual property.  If you wrote and sold a book about writing computer code and used the proceeds to fund your code writing business, you would not enter the sale proceeds on your books as an investment.

3) Go about your business and stay under the radar. There are certainly regulators who believe that the whole idea of crypto-currency is a scam.  At the same time, it does not seem to be difficult to raise money using these digital coins. There are multiple reports of multi-million dollar raises being accomplished within hours.  I can see no reason why anyone trying to raise money in this market would write numerous articles or give interviews bashing banks or Wall Street firms or proclaiming crypto-currencies as the new form of unregulated capitalism.  The best way to attract regulators is often to publicize how much money you are making in an “unregulated” business.

If you do want a formal legal opinion letter that your ICO is not the offering of securities, I would be happy to review the facts and prepare one for you. I probably charge a little less than the big Wall Street law firms.  I know that you will understand that I will need to be paid in US dollars not whatever coin you are issuing.  I cannot use your coins at the market, gas station or movies and it is probably going to be a long, long time before I can.