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Earlier today, Riccardo Spagni aka FluffyPony, the lead maintainer of Monero, spoke about the SEC’s guidance on tokens being classified as securities, in an interview with Monero Talk. Spagni particularly spoke about whether Monero can be classified as a security.
The SEC released a framework on analyzing whether a token can be classified as security or not. The framework explained the Howey Test, stating that it can be applied to anything, even if the asset did not have signs of being an investment contract. The Howey Test determines whether a contract or an asset is a security or not based on three main factors. The first factor taken into consideration is investment of money; the second is expectation of profit; and the third is common enterprise.
With respect to this, the host stated that the commission implied that the asset had to “be a true open source decentralized protocol,” adding that Bitcoin would fall under this category. He then asked Spagni whether it was the same with Monero, considering the fact that the project had no leader or control.
To this, Spagni stated that the “SEC guidance will never really matter to Monero,” as it did not have a pre-sale. He further stated that Monero’s launch was similar to that of Bitcoin, adding that this fact was “very important.” He also spoke about another aspect Monero shared with Bitcoin, the miners being the ones responsible for its emission since the beginning. He said,
[…] Monero can’t possibly be a security because a security requires a central issuer to have issued at some of the tokens or whatever upfront and sell them to people […]
Spagni added that there was, in fact, no way to buy Monero before the Genesis block, clarifying that after the first block was mined, Monero followed the “mathematically-bound emission curve.”
[…] there was no way to buy Monero before the Genesis block and from the Genesis block, it followed the mathematically-bound emission curve and there was no possible way for anyone to do, sort of, premine anything that could be sold to investors. So that makes things massively different […]”
Source (https://ambcrypto.com/sec-guidance-will-never-really-matter-to-monero-xmr-says-riccardo-spagni/)