A federal judge this week may have added some clarity to whether initial coin offerings fall under securities law after issuing a first-of-its-kind ruling in a criminal context.
In a case out of the Eastern District of New York, U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearlie ruled that securities law is fair game in prosecuting cryptocurrency fraud. Dearlie’s ruling rebuffed a motion to dismiss filed by defense counsel for Maksim Zaslavskiy. The judge denied that cryptocurrencies are “expressly excluded” from being defined as a security, an argument buttressed by existing case law, defense counsel argued.
