SEC vs NFTs

[zasad@]

I think that in this process SEC has a great chance of winning the case in court and therefore the company will conclude a pre-trial agreement and pay a fine. I didn’t delve deeply into the essence of the matter, but it seems that the company sold NFTs instead of tokens on ICO.
And if the project is serious, then 6 million won't be a big deal for them.

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[bbc.reporter]

It appears you cannot make memes about cats and the market when uncle Gary is reading what you post on social media hehehe.

The SEC sent a cease and desist to a NFT project for creating a meme and sharing it on social media. I do not know where uncle Gary misunderstood this. This is clearly a joke. This might be a freedom of speech case similar Larry Flynt and Hustler magazine where they printed a cartoon of a pastor having sex with his own mother.



a) @StonerCatsTV tweeted on September 7, 2021 a meme suggesting that the smartest thing to do during a dip in the crypto markets would be to “Buy more ETH & sweep the Stoner Cats floor.”

Source https://www.sec.gov/files/litigation/admin/2023/33-11233.pdf

[bbc.reporter]

News update.

Stoner Cats NFT's team agreed to pay a fine. I speculate that this might not be the last NFT project that will be cracked down by the SEC. Does this imply that the free mint collections similar to Cryptopunks are safer investments? They might be hehehe.



The creator of the popular Stoner Cats animated web series will pay a $1 million civil fine to settle U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charges it conducted an unregistered offering of crypto asset securities by selling non-fungible tokens, the regulator said on Wednesday.

Stoner Cats 2 LLC did not admit or deny wrongdoing in settling charges it illegally raised $8.2 million in July 2021 by selling 10,320 NFTs for about $800 each, which sold out in 35 minutes.

Source https://www.reuters.com/legal/sec-fines-stoner-cats-creator-offering-nfts-2023-09-13/

[zasad@]

Press Release
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-178
SEC Charges Creator of Stoner Cats Web Series for Unregistered Offering of NFTs

[zasad@]

The SEC investigated NBA Top Shot developer Dapper Labs, but decided to close case in September
https://fortune.com/crypto/2024/04/11/sec-dapper-labs-investigation-case-closed-september-2023-roham-gharegozlou/
"Following the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, the SEC has steadily sued and investigated a suite of crypto companies, including TRON Foundation, Terraform Labs, Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, and now Uniswap. And settlements with Impact Theory and Stoner Cats in the second half of 2023 imply that the regulator has begun to seriously scrutinize the NFT industry.

The agency’s decision to close its investigation into Dapper Labs, one of the most funded companies in the market, may indicate a course correction. “It will surely provide some kind of comfort to participants in the NFT market,” Philip Moustakis, a securities lawyer at Seward & Kissel, told Fortune.

He added, though, that “you can’t presume that all NFTs are safe. The SEC has already made the point that some transactions in NFTs could constitute securities transactions.”

Arthur Jakoby, a former SEC prosecutor who now specializes in securities litigation at Herrick Feinstein LLP, cautioned against reading too much into the agency’s closure of its investigation. “It doesn’t mean they’re not going to investigate them next year,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that they think Dapper Labs hasn’t done something wrong. It doesn’t mean that they cleared Dapper Labs.” "