The European Union’s securities watchdog has a new initiative to develop suitable regulations for initial coin offerings (ICOs) and it requires investigating every single ICO.
The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) looks to be following the lead of the US on this front, which has notably tight restrictions on the industry that saw the Securities and Exchange Commision (SEC) shutting down a number of ICOs this year, including that from Dallas-based AriseBank and Centra Tech.
Chair of ESMA Steven Maijoor told the European Parliament’s economic affairs committee that he is interested in finding out how ICOs fit into existing financial regulation, and what the implication will be for the general capital raising sector.
As he says, however, this task has been particularly challenging as each initial token sale can differ in nature, and not all of them fall under the category of a ”financial instrument”. Those that do, fall under the current regulatory framework but those that don’t, raise the question ”what do we do with those ICOs that are outside the regulatory world’,’ as Maijoor puts it.
His colleague Andrea Enria, chair of the European Banking Authority, previously told officials that he thinks the correct path for action is to avoid stifling innovation, proposing that ICOs should be allowed to prevail without any influence from the EU.
However, he now says that the outcome is not as he hoped, predominantly because the warnings that the EU issued to retail investors regarding cryptocurrency assets have not been sufficient to raise awareness. Regulators across Europe have tried to inform potential crypto customers that there is no safety net should their investment not go as they expect, but apparently, this message has been largely lost.
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