Coinbase affirme que ses services de jalonnement ne sont pas des titres

• Coinbase a déclaré que ses services de jalonnement ne peuvent pas être classés comme des titres par la Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) des États-Unis.
• Paul Grewal, directeur juridique de la bourse, a déclaré que le jalonnement n'est ni un titre en vertu de la loi américaine sur les valeurs mobilières ni en vertu du test Howey.
• Grewal a noté que les récompenses ne sont pas décidées par l'échange mais par le protocole blockchain dans lequel les clients investissent et misent des jetons. 
• Plus tôt cette semaine, la SEC a forcé Kraken à fermer ses services de jalonnement aux États-Unis et la bourse a également payé une amende d'environ $30 millions.

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The largest crypto exchange in the United States, Coinbase, published a blog post on Feb. 10 stating that the company’s staking services cannot be classified as securities by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This blog was a result of the regulator shutting down another major exchange, Kraken’s staking services, after stating that the company failed to register these services as security offerings with the SEC.

D'après le billet de blog de Coinbase authored by Paul Grewal, the Chief Legal Officer at the exchange, staking is neither a security under the US Securities Act nor under the Howey test. Grewal added that “trying to superimpose securities law onto a process like staking doesn’t help consumers at all and instead imposes unnecessarily aggressive mandates that will prevent US consumers from accessing basic crypto services and push users to offshore, unregulated platforms.” 

Comme indiqué précédemment par Bitnation, le SEC revendiqué dans l'action contre Kraken that staking involves customers giving up their coins to the platform. The regulator believes that Kraken “not only offered investors outsized returns untethered to any economic realities, but also retained the right to pay them no returns at all.”

“When a customer asks us to stake some of their crypto, they aren’t giving up one thing to get something else – they own exactly the same thing they did before. Staking customers retain full ownership of their assets at all times, as well as the right to “unstake” those assets consistent with the underlying protocol,” noted Grewal. 

It is crucial to note that the Howey test includes four elements that govern if an offering can be considered a security: investment of money, common enterprise, reasonable expectation of profits, and efforts of others. Coinbase CLO added in the blog post that the company’s staking services do not come under any of these elements and also, do not meet the “common enterprise” prong of Howey because assets are staked on decentralized networks. 

Grewal noted that “stakers are only connected by blockchain technology and they validate transactions through a community of users, not a common enterprise.” He noted that the rewards are not decided by Coinbase but by the blockchain protocol in which the customers invest and stake tokens. 

The staking services also do not come under the “reasonable expectation of profits” element because “staking rewards are simply payments for validation services provided to the blockchain, not a return on investment.” Moreover, staking also do not pay rewards based on the “efforts of others” because it is the protocol’s blockchain that governs everything. 

“The purpose of securities law is to correct for imbalances in information. But there is no imbalance of information in staking, as all participants are connected on the blockchain and are able to validate transactions through a community of users with equal access to the same information,” noted Grewal. 

Un fait important à noter ici est que Kraken a mis fin à ses opérations de jalonnement aux États-Unis et ne permettra plus aux citoyens du pays de jalonner leurs actifs. D'autre part, les résidents non américains peuvent jalonner leurs crypto-monnaies. 

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