The DeFi Education Fund and the Uniswap Foundation have called for the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to stay away from regulating decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs).
The two bodies sent a joint letter to SEC Crypto Task Force lead Hester Peirce on May 27, 2025 arguing that the SEC should not treat DAOs under the purview of the securities-defining Howey test as to whether they are “sufficiently decentralised”.
“If a DAO has a dispersed collection of token holders who have the opportunity to actively participate in and govern the DAO and the network, it is sufficiently decentralised such that neither the network token for that DAO, nor transactions in which that network token are the object, should be considered a security,” they said in the letter, adding that DAOs should be treated as individuals or a group of persons unless proved otherwise.
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Fungible Cryptos In Secondary Sales Are Not Securities, Ripple Tells SEC
Blockchain company Ripple has argued that fungible cryptocurrencies are not securities when transferred in secondary transactions.
In a recent letter sent to the US SEC, Ripple cited US attorney and crypto law thought leader Lewis Cohen to support its claim. In his widely cited 2022 paper, “The Ineluctable Modality of Securities Law: Why Fungible Crypto Assets Are Not Securities,” Cohen had written: “[T]here is no current basis in the law relating to ‘investment contracts’ to classify most fungible crypto assets as ‘securities’ when transferred in secondary transactions.”
Cohen had written in his paper that in secondary transactions, an investment contract transaction is generally not present. He further claimed that fungible cryptocurrencies “neither create nor represent the necessary cognizable legal relationship between” a legal entity and the holder that is the “hallmark of a security.”
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US Banks Tiptoe Towards Crypto, Await Green Signal From Regulators
US banks are holding internal discussions about expanding into cryptocurrencies. According to a report by Reuters citing four industry executives, banks are considering initial steps centring on pilot programs, partnerships, or limited crypto trading to start with.
The four executives, who spoke on conditions of anonymity, said that if a major firm expands without issues, others will be fast followers to run small-scale pilot projects and weigh other business prospects before expanding.
