Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Tokens Are Not Securities

Programming note: Money Stuff will be off tomorrow and Friday, back on Monday.

SEC token taxonomy

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, you could raise hundreds of millions of dollars for a business by selling “tokens” “of” the business, tokens that were in some loose but definite sense linked to the economic success of that business. You could go around saying “we are launching the next hot crypto protocol, and it is going to be ‘a life-changing, you know, world-altering protocol that’s gonna replace all the big banks,’ and when it does that the tokens of the protocol will ...