New York Federal Court's View On Cryptocurrency as Securities

On September 11, 2018, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York denied¹ a motion to dismiss an indictment of a Brooklyn real estate entrepreneur in relation to two virtual currency investment schemes and initial coin offerings ("ICOs"). The indictment, which charged securities fraud against Maksim Zaslavskiy, was based, in part, on the theory that the cryptocurrencies at issue were securities. In his motion to dismiss, Zaslavskiy argued that this premise was faulty and the ICOs offered by the two companies he owned, REcoin Group Foundation, LLC ("REcoin") and DRC World, Inc. ("DRC"), were not, in fact, securities. The court, then, was called upon to consider whether the securities laws apply to cryptocurrencies. The court also considered Zaslavskiy's argument that the securities laws are void for vagueness as applied to cryptocurrencies and token sales.