This week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Cyan v. Beaver County Employees Retirement Fund could have a major impact on how and where we see class action securities claims brought against issuers of new cryptocurrencies.

By way of background, not even Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous developer credited with creating Bitcoin, could have predicted that the first truly transformative use of his innovative blockchain technology would be to disintermediate venture fundraising through the sale of proprietary virtual tokens. Unfortunately for the issuers of the more than 1,500 cryptocurrencies or tokens that have already been issued — many of which were promoted to inexperienced and unaccredited investors as nonsecurity “utility tokens” — the Securities and Exchange Commission has taken an increasingly hostile view of token sales. SEC head Jay Clayton has gone so far as stating that he has not seen a token sale that he does not consider the sale of securities.

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