Block.one agrees to pay $24M penalty for unregistered EOS ICO

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced on Monday that it has settled charges against blockchain builder Block.one for conducting an unregistered initial coin offering (ICO). The firm has agreed to pay a $24 million penalty. Block.one is the company behind the EOS blockchain, it conducted an ICO between 2017 to 2018 in which it raised $4.1 billion.  

In an announcement, the regulator states that Block.one did not register its ICO as a securities offering, while "a number of US investors participated in Block.one's ICO," said Stephanie Avakian, co-director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement. The regulator therefore found that Block.one violated the securities laws and ordered the penalty.

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“Block.one did not provide ICO investors the information they were entitled to as participants in a securities offering,” said another co-director of the Division of Enforcement, Steven Peikin, “The SEC remains committed to bringing enforcement cases when investors are deprived of material information they need to make informed investment decisions.”

Shortly after publication, Block.one issued a statement on its website.

“We are excited to resolve these discussions with the SEC and are committed to ongoing collaboration with regulators and policy makers as the world continues to develop more clarity around compliance frameworks for digital assets.
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About Author

Celia joined The Block as a reporter after earning her BA in the History of Science from the University of Chicago. Having spent years pondering over why 2+2 cannot equal 5, she is interested in the history and philosophy of mathematics, computation, and cryptography. She also had a very brief stint at Crunchbase News.