In 2018, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) authorized a much larger number of Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) to sell securities. Most of These ICOs sold securities to large-scale investors legally.
The data was assimilated using the agency’s EDGAR technology. The Electronic Data Gathering Analysis and Retrieval system searched all relative keywords to locate all cases. This way, 287 files were found for the ICO projects that the SEC approved. All of the ICOs were permitted the sale of securities through under Form D.
Form D is a brief form that a firm uses to disclose information that concerns details relative to the investors. The form is not a prerequisite; in fact, such a form can be submitted a fortnight after the first token sale. The form is shorter than the reports required by the agencies before non-exempt securities can be sold to US investors.
However, this form does have its limitation, and the exempted securities can only be sold to a certain group of investors. The investors must either have a steady income of $200,000 per annum or a net worth higher than USD 1 million. On the other hand, an enterprise can invest only if the assets owned by the enterprise are worth more than $5 million.
Looking into the details, 87 companies were listed in the first quarter, 99 in the second while 53 in the third and 48 companies listed in the fourth quarter. The combined declared value of all ICOs was almost $8.7 billion.
Moreover, the commission recently revealed that crypto investigation would be their top priority for 2019.
