I read that more as the SEC saying "We didn't reall know what we were dealing with at the time." And their thinking and policy decisions have evolved.to fit both their understanding and evolving crypto scene.
Same should apply to XRP then because it exist way longer than ETH. But unlike ETH, XRP was never sold in return for and arbitrary amount of BTC/USD it was first given away for free and later sold at market value.
Date of origin may not matter as much as when it came to the SEC's attention. The SEC allowed BTC & ETH under a set of policies & understanding of crypto. That understanding evolved, changing policy, and then XRP got on their radar under the new policy regime. It probably helps that ETH was at least nominally tied to the USD.
Keep in mind I'm not defending the SEC's decision, just speculating on how the policy decisions might have been made & justified.
Why? Does it hurt you? Its all just a huge tech experiment just like the internet was. We have no clue where it leads to but I want to see it in 10 or 20 years.
What I mean to say is they should both be regulated as securities which is what they both are. And yeah it's fly by night unregulated attitude hurts plenty of people. Doesn't have to hurt me to be bad.
A security of what?
Just because it does hurt people doesn't make it inherently bad. If you could avoid being hurt maybe other can too and thous who did get hurt anyway took the risk on purpose. Noting wrong with that. The SEC should prevent people from misleading or fraudulent offerings not from anything that has a known high risk. Selling a random token is like printing my own money. The SEC would not prevent me form selling worthless piece of paper if I dont mislead buyers into thinking its some kind of ownership for something. There is a difference between preventing fraud and preventing stupidity.
There’s a legal test called the Howey test you can use to find out if what you’re looking at is a security. [1] Roughly speaking a security is anything you put your money into with the expectation of it becoming worth more through no effort of your own.
> “Selling a random token is like printing my own money. The SEC would not prevent me form selling worthless piece of paper if I dont mislead buyers into thinking its some kind of ownership for something.”
You seem to misunderstand the definition of a security but even if you were right the conversation doesn’t end there.
The SEC absolutely has a mandate under the Securities Act to stop people who could be hurt by garbage offerings from buying them. They got this because permitting random unregulated securities sales in part led to the Great Depression, and they didn’t call it that because it was a pretty good depression. Sale of hot garbage on margin to folks who had no idea what they were doing destabilized the entire American financial system for a decade.
This is totally fair because if folks, especially poor folks, get wiped out they end up on public assistance. That means gains are privatized and losses are socialized. The SEC drew a totally reasonable middle ground line with the accredited investor rules. Accredited investors can buy all the hot garbage they want. Folks who can’t afford to can’t. That’s what securities registration gets us.
You may not agree with it but it is strictly their mandate.