Blockchain Legal Resource

On June 8, 2023, Judge William H. Orrick of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California granted a default judgment in favor of the CFTC against Ooki DAO, a cryptocurrency decentralized autonomous exchange. The court also permanently enjoined Ooki DAO from operating its website and awarded the CTFC $643,542 in monetary damages. The court found that Ooki DAO’s lack of participation in the litigation and refusal to appear in court contributed to the default judgment. This decision brings to a close the closely-watched case that establishes new precedents for the legal liability of decentralized autonomous exchanges.

On November 28, 2022, the Council of the European Union (EU) formally adopted the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), following the European Parliament’s formal adoption of the directive earlier last month. The CSRD is a broad environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting framework that will impose uniform, mandatory reporting requirements on many companies with European operations, including companies not based in Europe.

On March 9, 2021, a bipartisan bill was reintroduced that would, among other things, exclude digital tokens from the definition of a security under federal securities laws. As introduced, H.R. 1628, known as the Token Taxonomy Act, would define a “digital token” as a token that is created pursuant to rules for which the creation and supply are not controlled by a central group or single person, among other requirements. To qualify as a “digital token” under the bill, the transaction history must be able to resist modification or tampering by a single person or group or persons under common control. Moreover, the digital token must be capable of being transferred between persons without an intermediate custodian.

On May 29, 2020, the Digital Dollar Project, an organization seeking to advance the development of a United States central bank digital currency (CBDC), published a detailed white paper entitled “Exploring a US CBDC.”  The white paper posits that if the US dollar is to remain the world’s primary reserve currency, it cannot remain an analog instrument and unit of account for assets increasingly denominated as digital tokens. Instead, the white paper reasons that the dollar must itself become a digital tokenized currency that measures, supports, and transacts with other digital assets.