Ethereum’s Joe Lubin: Ethereum and Bitcoin Didn’t Have to Comply with Regulations of Today

Joseph Lubin, the Ethereum co-founder has given an interview for the news outlet Forkast, an interview that was released on November 18^th and in which he’s saying that Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum didn’t have to comply with new regulations like other new projects did.

Lubin was interviewed at the Hong Kong FinTech Week. He didn’t only talk about the Ethereum and Bitcoin, he also noted how new projects have to comply with regulations and how important security law is for the crypto space.

Tokens Must be Sure to Increase in Price

Lubin continued by saying that, in order to attract investors, projects need to promise that their tokens’ price will increase. He also claimed that since this is acquired through developers’ work, the assets sold are security. As a result, utility tokens can no longer be sold as utility tokens because they’re tokenized security. He further had to say that utility tokens are impossible to be sold equitably and broadly.

Ethereum’s Advantage as First on the Market

Lubin explained why Ethereum didn’t have to comply with regulations, by saying that it had the advantage of being among the first players in the crypto industry. This means developers at Ethereum had the great opportunity to sell and distribute their cryptocurrency without having to respect any regulations, seeing the crypto space wasn’t yet regulated when Ethereum entered the market. Competing projects can’t claim to sell utility tokens and not register them as a security. What Lubin had to say furthermore is that regulation makes it possible, yet in a very difficult manner, for good projects to have an early head start and to end up having a massive effect in the network, just like Ethereum did.

As an example of what consequences securities law applications can have on crypto assets, Telegram has recently asked in court for the accusations made by US regulators and that are saying its Gram tokens are securities to be thrown out.