Gary Gensler: All tokens held by the general seller are securities.

US Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman: All tokens held by the general seller are securities.

Gary Gensler, chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, said in a recent speech to the Aspen Security Association that he considered all cryptocurrencies with initial public offering or public sells to be securities and that some exchanges were likely to trade in some of them.

According to shetcoiner and quoted to coindesk, Gary Gensler, chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, believes that most cryptocurrencies with public pre-sale violate US securities law.

In a recent speech to the Aspen Security Association, Gensler said he agreed with Jay Clayton, who said that all cryptocurrencies that have an initial public offering or a pre-sale are considered securities.

Gensler has said:

“Generally, folks buying these tokens are anticipating profits, and there’s a small group of entrepreneurs and technologists standing up and nurturing the projects,” Gensler said in prepared remarks. “I believe we have a crypto market now where many tokens may be unregistered securities, without required disclosures or market oversight.”

“These tokens may allow the market to be manipulated, and this will hurt investors first and foremost,” he said.

Gensler has previously said that he considers “stable value tokens backed by securities” to be securities themselves, which means that they must be registered with the stock exchange and their issuers must comply with existing government laws.

He also continued in his saying:

“A typical trading platform has more than 50 tokens on it. In fact, many have well in excess of 100 tokens. While each token’s legal status depends on its own facts and circumstances, the probability is quite remote that, with 50 or 100 tokens, any given platform has zero securities,”

Gensler also referred to the stock exchange commission’s treatment of traded funds (ETFs). Over the past year, more than a dozen institutions have applied to the commission to set up a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund.

He also noted that investment instruments in cryptocurrencies, including mutual funds, already exist. He did not elaborate on his proposals, but stressed the importance of legislation to protect the rights of investors.

Referring to the Chicago Board of Trade (CME), the chairman of the American Stock Exchange Commission also said:

“Given these important protections, I look forward to the staff’s review of such filings, particularly if those are limited to these CME-traded bitcoin futures,” he said, referring to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.