Posts by: Mark Janoff

Crypto Regulation Marches On With Potential Consequences for Trading Systems

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A flurry of recent activity has reinforced the SEC’s commitment to regulate crypto assets, including trading systems that trade crypto asset securities.

WHAT HAPPENED?

The SEC shared additional information in April 2023 on whether and how its proposal to expand the definition of “exchange” would affect trading systems for crypto asset securities. The SEC initially issued the proposal in January 2022. This revised proposal responds to comments the agency received requesting clarity on the application of existing rules and the proposal related to crypto asset security trading platforms that meet the proposed definition of an exchange or trading systems that use distributed ledger or blockchain technology, including DeFi systems.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

If the proposals take effect, they may require many crypto asset security trading platforms to register as national securities exchanges or as broker-dealers that must comply with Regulation ATS, which governs alternative trading systems. As currently drafted in the proposal, this would include decentralized exchanges operating on order book or automated-market-maker models.

WHAT DOES THE PROPOSAL SAY?

Current regulations say that a trading system must bring together “orders” to qualify as an exchange. The proposal would categorize a trading system as an exchange if it brings together “trading interest.”

Also, the rule now says an exchange must have “established, non-discretionary methods … under which such orders interact with each other, and the buyers and sellers entering such orders agree to the terms of a trade.” The SEC’s proposal would require only that an exchange include “communication protocols” for the interaction of trading interest.

WHAT’S THE CONTEXT?

When the SEC shared additional information on how expanding the definition of “exchange” could affect trading systems, it was just the latest of several signs of the SEC’s stance on regulating crypto assets.

  • SEC Chair Gary Gensler said in a statement that “many crypto trading platforms already come under the current definition of an exchange and thus have an existing duty to comply with the securities laws.”
  • In a statement at a House Financial Services Committee hearing on SEC oversight, Chair Gensler also reiterated his view that, “given that most crypto tokens are securities, it follows that many crypto intermediaries are transacting in securities and have to register with the SEC.”
  • The hearing also touched on the SEC’s proposed $2.15 billion budget for fiscal year 2023, which represents an increase of almost $240 million to what it sought in fiscal year 2022. Notably, fintech accounted for half of the six key areas identified in its budget justification, including goals to:
    • prevent fraud concerning crypto assets.
    • ensure crypto assets register and comply with securities laws where appropriate.
    • craft the right regulatory and enforcement approach to fintech startups.

The SEC’s focus on enforcement of crypto matters does not appear to be slowing. Its Crypto Asset and Cyber Unit was initially envisioned as a 20-person operation but has doubled in size. Moreover, just a few weeks ago, the SEC also shared job postings for additional positions in the unit.

5 Ways Venture Investment in Blockchain Differs from Investment in Traditional High-Growth Startups

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Venture investments in blockchain companies are often similar to investments in traditional, high-growth technology startups. However, there are a few differences any company or investor should know about:

  • Board Seats: Lead investors in venture backed companies often require a right to designate a member of the company’s board of directors. Having a seat on the board lets investors exercise corporate governance oversight and influence the overall company’s strategic direction. However, given the complex and evolving regulatory and enforcement environment in blockchain, as well as difficulties of blockchain companies in obtaining cost-effective directors and officers liability insurance, investors often decline to obtain or fill a seat on the board. Investors may prefer board observer rights or stockholder-level approval rights.
  • Token Rights: Blockchain-based companies can provide returns to investors via capital appreciation of the preferred stock investors purchase and/or via tokens or other digital assets tied to the target company’s products. As a result, investors often require secure rights to tokens in the future via token warrants, token side letters, or simple contractual covenants. The features of token rights investors negotiate for is often specific to a company’s business and stage of growth.
  • Blockchain-Specific Diligence: Investors often conduct more thorough legal due diligence in blockchain companies than they would for traditional high-growth technology startups. For example, investors in blockchain companies usually ask detailed questions about the company’s efforts and plans for regulatory compliance – including in areas of securities regulation, anti-money laundering and money transmitter regulation, and tax. In addition, because many blockchain companies use open-source code, investors typically want comprehensive representations and diligence regarding the company’s compliance with the open-source licenses that underlie the company’s products.
  • Negative Covenants: It is not uncommon in traditional venture capital financings to have negative covenants governing matters on which the investors’ consents are required.  Blockchain-based companies, however, bring increased focus on these covenants given the typical trajectory of many companies in the space.  For example, there may be additional covenants around how the company’s subsidiaries and affiliate entities are governed and what they are permitted to do.  Additionally, licensing intellectual property outside the ordinary course of business will likely get additional attention.  Lastly, notwithstanding the existence of fiduciary duties typically imposed by state law, it is not uncommon to see negative covenants relating to transactions between the company and its executive officers.  While none of these provisions are used solely in blockchain companies, due to the nature of these kinds of companies, investors will have an increased focus on these kinds of provisions.
  • Transaction Timing and Costs:  In part because of the increased diligence and custom negotiation with respect to governance rights, token rights, and negative covenants, investments in blockchain companies often take longer and cost more than investments in traditional startups. Companies should be prepared for the increase in time and cost as they venture into their fundraising cycles.

5 Things to Know About Token Warrants

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Venture capital investors in blockchain companies often require formal rights to receive tokens or other digital assets created by those companies. Typically, these rights are provided through an instrument called a “token warrant.” While token warrants are most frequently issued in priced rounds, they have become increasingly prevalent in connection with SAFE or other convertible rounds. Here are five things that any blockchain company or investor should know when evaluating token warrants:

  1. Token Warrants Can Confer Broad or Narrow Rights. Companies and investors should pay close attention to the types of tokens that warrants entitle their holders to acquire. Token warrants may provide holders with rights to receive one specific type of token only, such as the first governance token issued by a company. However, token warrants typically provide holders with rights to receive any future tokens created or issued by a company or its affiliates – as well as any future tokens issued by an acquiror of the company’s intellectual property or any entity established by or on behalf of the company to issue tokens or operate a blockchain-based protocol or other technology associated with the tokens. Token warrants may also provide holders with rights to receive tokens created or issued by the company’s founders.
  2. Exclusions May Apply. Token warrants often outline specific types of tokens that are not acquirable under the terms of the warrant. Often known as Excluded Tokens, they generally include tokens that are generated pursuant to mining, staking, or reward systems. Depending on the applicable company’s business, Excluded Tokens may also include non-fungible tokens, stablecoins, or certain tokens issued in the ordinary course of business. Typically, the company and its investors will negotiate what is considered an Excluded Token based on the company’s business model.
  3. The Number of Tokens Issuable to Holders Can Be Calculated Several Ways. Token warrants specify the share of tokens holders can acquire under the warrant. This typically depends on three key variables:
    • The set of tokens from which the holder’s share is calculated: The holder’s share may be calculated from the number of tokens minted, from the number of tokens minted and issued to the company’s “insiders,” which includes the company’s stockholders and holders of its convertible or exercisable securities, or otherwise. In the “insider” structure, the holder would not be entitled to any share of tokens that are reserved for community members or other non-“insiders.” In addition, token warrants may provide holders with rights to tokens issued in inflationary events or in connection with other increases in the token supply.
    • How to calculate the holder’s share: The holder’s share may be a hard-coded percentage, but it is more typically based on the holder’s fully diluted ownership of the company. In the latter structure, the holder’s share will typically equal its fully diluted ownership as a percentage of the total cap table. But investors may negotiate a “super” pro rata share, which is a multiple (e.g. 1.25x, 1.5x) of the investor’s fully diluted ownership.
    • When to calculate it: The time at which a holder’s share is calculated can make a difference in how many tokens the holder has a right to acquire. For example, the holder’s share may be calculated as of the date of warrant issuance, the date of the applicable token launch, or the date the warrant is exercised.
  4. “Lockup” Provisions Govern the Transferability of Tokens. Token warrants typically specify the “lockup” restrictions that will prevent holders from transferring tokens acquired under the warrant for certain periods. Lockup schedules in token warrants may include provisions that prohibit any transfers of tokens for one year after the tokens are acquired, release some tokens from lockup at the one-year mark, and then release the balance over successive monthly increments. For example, a lockup schedule may prohibit 100% of the tokens from being transferred until the one-year anniversary of the exercise date, and then permit the transfer of 50% of the tokens on the one-year anniversary and 1/24th, 1/36th or 1/48th of remaining tokens over the next two to four years. A common provision requires an early release of the lockup provision if certain “insiders” (particularly founders or board members) have a less stringent lockup period. Token warrants may also provide the token issuer with rights to impose additional transfer restrictions on tokens in light of regulatory requirements or in connection with centralized exchange listing requirements.
  5. Beware of Token Warrants that Compensate Service Providers. Token warrants are not ideal instruments for compensating a company’s service providers (e.g. employees, contractors, advisors). The Internal Revenue Code subjects deferred compensation – including token warrants – to a variety of complex and generally unfavorable tax, vesting and exercise rules. Therefore, companies should generally limit issuing token warrants to investors.

Cooperatives: An Ownership Model for Digital Networks

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Japanese: 協同組合――デジタル・ネットワークのオーナーシップのモデル
Chinese: 合作社：数字经济的新所有权模式

Turbulence in crypto and blockchain has shed light on a question that has received increasing attention: how web3 companies share ownership in digital networks, including through tokens.

As the industry wrestles with this question, builders and investors should consider adding cooperatives to their ownership structures. A handful of web3 projects have done so, but the model is not widely understood in the web3 context.

Credit unions, rural utilities, insurance companies, and agriculture producers often organize as cooperatives. In web3, projects that add cooperatives to their ownership structures could boost participation and reduce regulatory risk while giving users more control of the digital networks they use and a share of the value they create.

The SEC has consistently declined to classify cooperative memberships as securities, enabling cooperatives to distribute ownership to users quickly and easily, while also offering important protections to their members.

A new white paper from Orrick, KPMG and Upside Cooperative explores whether a legal structure common to credit unions and rural utilities could help revitalize blockchain and realize the web3 vision of a new digital world.

DOWNLOAD THE FULL REPORT

Proof-of-Stake Rewards: Payment for Services or a Baked Cake?

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Against the backdrop of rapidly evolving blockchain technology, the IRS has oftentimes been slow to update its related tax guidance, leaving participants in the blockchain ecosystem uncertain about their tax obligations. Perhaps nowhere is this lethargy more pronounced than in the context of the consensus mechanisms that drives the entire blockchain network. Whereas, traditionally, coins rewarded pursuant to proof-of-work mechanisms have been treated as payment for services, an alternative class of consensus mechanisms, called proof-of-stake, may just be different enough to result in deferred taxation. Whether this is true is the subject of a recent legal claim that may, once resolved, shed light on the tax treatment of the increasingly popular proof-of-stake consensus mechanism.

Proof-of-Work Taxation

In 2014, an IRS Notice stated that a person that mines new blocks in a blockchain through a proof-of-work consensus mechanism must include any virtual currency received in connection with such activities in the miner’s gross income at the virtual currency’s fair market value. The ruling had an immediate impact on blockchains, such as Ethereum and Bitcoin, that depend on miners to add new data or ‘blocks’ to the chain. Through the proof-of-work consensus mechanism, miners are challenged to be the first to identify the missing number needed to solve a staggeringly complex hashing algorithm. For the lucky few who succeed, thousands of dollars’ worth of Ether or Bitcoin are awarded and—according to the IRS—taxable on receipt.

In the years following the IRS’s ruling, however, the taxation of mining has been complicated by the gradual adoption of an alternative consensus mechanism referred to as proof-of-stake. Under this method, miners—now typically called validators—are required to “stake” their holdings of a blockchain’s native coin in order to be eligible to win the right to add a new block to the chain. The more coins that a validator stakes, the greater the chance that they will be selected by the blockchain’s validation algorithm to add a new block to the chain. If the selected validator proposes an invalid block, however, the validator’s coins (or portion thereof) will be destroyed. This risk of loss in proof-of-stake validation adds a layer of complexity that is not present under the proof-of-work model, which simply involves the payment of virtual currency in exchange for the use of raw computational power to solve the mathematical puzzle. In addition, token holders will often stake their holdings to allow a third party, a validator, to use their tokens to validate the transaction as part of the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. A welcome feature of proof-of-stake validation is that it requires considerably less energy than proof-of-work validation.

Whether this new feature is enough to challenge the taxability of any tokens or coins generated by the validation process has remained an open question that has only recently been publicly considered by the IRS.

The Jarretts—Answers at Last?

Sometime in 2019, Joshua Jarrett decided to participate on the Tezos blockchain as a validator. Jarrett staked his holdings in the native coin—Tezos—and as luck would have it, he won the right to propose new blocks on the Tezos chain. In return for validating the next block on the Tezos chain via the proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, Jarrett received 8,876 Tezos coins and dutifully paid $3,293 in federal taxes on the gain reported on his and his spouse’s joint federal income tax return.

A year later, the Jarretts had a change of heart and sought a $3,293 refund by filing an amended tax return. The Jarretts took the belated position that the coins were not taxable, using the “creation of an asset” theory. They argued that “new property—property not received as payment or compensation from another person but created by the taxpayer—is not and has never been income under U.S. federal tax law.” The Jarretts further reckoned that “[l]ike the baker or the writer, Mr. Jarrett will realize taxable income when he first sells or exchanges the new property he created, but the federal income tax law does not permit the taxation of the Jarrett’s [sic] simply because Mr. Jarrett created new property.”  The IRS denied the Jarretts’ refund claim, and the Jarretts filed a refund suit in the Middle District of Tennessee. Had the Jarretts taken the position on their original return that the reward was not taxable upon receipt, the IRS would have had been required to assess the unpaid tax. If the Jarretts wanted to challenge the assessment, they would have had to do so in the Tax Court. The IRS (and often many taxpayers) prefers to litigate technical issues in the Tax Court because of the court’s technical expertise.

The government countered that Joshua Jarrett never created new Tezos coins. Rather, in line with the tax treatment applicable to proof-of-work, the government argued that “Jarrett exchanged Tezos tokens for goods and/or services during 2019.” As such, Jarrett received the coins as payment for successfully proposing new blocks to the Tezos chain, and those coins were indeed taxable on receipt.

In something of an about-face, at the start of 2022, the government relented and offered to refund the Jarretts, as they had initially requested. However, unwilling to accept the government’s offer, the Jarretts have since elected to press on in order to force a definitive ruling on the taxability of virtual currency generated from proof-of-stake consensus mechanisms. The case is scheduled for trial in March 2023, and a final ruling may not take place until then.

Nonetheless, the Jarretts’ case is important to the blockchain industry as many chains have adopted, or are in the process of migrating toward, a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism, including Ethereum. The government’s initial concession appears to provide some basis to argue that perhaps an alternative tax treatment is appropriate, but the IRS may simply want to identify a taxpayer that did not report the tokens as taxable, assess a deficiency and force the taxpayer to sue in Tax Court. Blockchain participants, however, will have to wait for a firmer, and much needed, answer.