The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has announced on Wednesday that it has settled charges against Blotics Ltd, the operator behind Coinschedule.com, a website that listed offerings of digital asset securities known as initial coin offerings (ICOs). According to the press release, the commission found that the firm violated federal securities laws by failing to disclose the compensation that it received from the ICOs issuers it listed on the website.<\/p>\n
The company is based in the United Kingdom, and the SEC\u2019s order states that such a website was accessible from the United States from 2016 to 2019, which represented a high portion of the traffic it received. \u201cVisitors to Coinschedule.com were presented with details about each profiled digital token offering in so-called \u2018listing\u2019 profiles, which also included links to the token issuers\u2019 own websites and a \u201ctrust score\u201d that Coinschedule claimed reflected its evaluation of the \u2018credibility\u2019 and \u2018operational risk\u2019 for each digital token offering based on a \u2018proprietary algorithm.\u2019\u00a0 In reality, the token issuers paid Coinschedule to profile their token offerings on Coinschedule.com, a fact that Coinschedule failed to disclose to visitors,\u201d the SEC alleged.<\/p>\n
In fact, the SEC says that many of the ICOs listed by the website appears in the DAO Report published in 2017, which warned that \u201ccoins sold in ICOs may be securities and that those who offer and sell securities in the U.S. must comply with federal securities laws.\u201d Blotics Ltd agreed to cease and desist from any future violations of the federal securities laws, the commission said, as well as paying $43,000 in disgorgement and a fine of $154,434.<\/p>\n
In June, the SEC also settled charges against Loci Inc. and its CEO, John Wise, for allegedly making false and misleading statements connected to fraud and an unregistered securities offering. Loci Inc. is an ICO issuer, which Wise used to raise $7.6 million from investors by offering and selling a digital token dubbed \u201cLOCIcoin.\u201d<\/p>\n