Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin is issuing a warning about the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), saying the regulator’s current policies on crypto will have a lasting effect on the industry.
In a new interview with Wired, Lubin says that if ETH is declared a security by the SEC, people in the US won’t be able to buy it, and developers won’t be able to develop Ethereum or build any more applications on top of the protocol.
Earlier this year, SEC Chair Gary Gensler refused to confirm whether or not he sees ETH as a security.
Says Lubin,
“If the SEC is able to make it stick, it will have a chilling effect on users of Ethereum across America…
If the US has its way, it might use its long arm of the law to reach into different countries around the world and create pressure to reduce access to decentralized protocols and financial disintermediation.
We don’t want to feel like we are being pushed out by an irrational or imprudent regulator. We need to stand our ground.”
Lubin is the CEO of Consensys, the creators of MetaMask, the world’s most popular crypto wallet, which recently received a Wells Notice from the SEC, which the regulator issues when it wants to warn of a coming enforcement action.
Consensys soon responded with a lawsuit against the SEC, which Lubin, whose worth was estimated to be between $1 billion and $5 billion in 2018 by Forbes, says aims to prevent the regulator from reclassifying ETH as a security.
“Our action relates to MetaMask. But it stands alone, too. The SEC has been gaslighting the industry for quite a while, essentially declaring internally that ETH is a security and enforcing that secret notion. It would continue to do that, I believe, unless we brought an independent action that stands alone on its own merits and gets at the heart of the matter: the SEC wants to reclassify ETH.
It’s hard to land a technological paradigm shift into a society that feels like everything is operating just fine. In past decades, internet technology caused confusion and required lots of dialogue and open-mindedness. In the US, safe harbors were created to enable web technology to flourish, which had a profoundly transformative effect.
This time around, I’m pretty sure it’s going to work out fine. But we’re in that really painful stage where there is resistance.”
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