clarify and confirm that the third-party clearing rules for ATSs do not apply to trades settled on-chain (and thus which do not involve counterparty risk posed by the trading parties to one another); and
clarify and confirm through guidance that smart-contract-based “decentralized exchanges” that are truly autonomous, non-custodial and peer-to-peer, such as those implementing the Uniswap and 0x protocols, are not required to be registered as securities exchanges or ATSs solely by virtue of the fact that persons may utilize them to trade in tokens representing investment contracts.
incredulously no one seems to be interested in this opportunity … the writer of the above open letter to Hester Pierce (an SEC commissioner) just got followed on twitter less than 24 hours after publishing the article… so now Aragon’s interests via proxy have a voice on the inside.
@carla perhaps you can help me out here… ? why am i not getting a response on this from the legal or any other team member ? this opportunity will not last
@redk We operate and develop under legal advise of leading legal offices with experience on blockchain in US and Europe, we don’t produce internal understandings from which we seek partners. As such we do not issue public legal opinions. It is under the interest of our legal partners to be in contact and alignment with regulators and legislators so they can better serve their clients.
In the shared article it is Mr. Shapiro as a individual that issue a legal opinion, not as his clients explaining their operational decisions. It is of course understandable that the two might be correlated. On our relationship with regulators it was never appreciated such public authoritative advice and would be unwise to suppose the outcome of it.
The two points you raise aren’t as black-and-white, instead they are highly dependent on a myriad of parameters. “Truly autonomous” is not a legal definition or physical reality, protocols in general are created, maintained and dependent in operation on a core entity that formed with that goal. Including having raised capital from both private and public with the goal of extracting profit from the protocols. It is due to this reality that concepts such as “sufficient decentralization” and “temporary safe harbor” are discussed, currently those are under specified and may not hold under the legal enforcement.