The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced on the 20th that it had sent $4.6 million in compensation to investors in the initial coin offering (ICO) of Ethereum-based search engine BitClave.
The payment is part of a settlement BitClave agreed to pay in 2020 after the SEC charged the search engine in 2017 with failing to register its ICO as a securities offering.
“The check came in the mail. We are paying more than $4.6 million to investors harmed by BitClave, PTE Ltd.’s unregistered ICO of digital asset securities. After going through the notification and claims process, investors will now receive shares of the BitClave Fair Fund,” the SEC said in a post on the X platform.
source: secretary
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In 2020, BitClave agreed to repay approximately 9,500 investors who had purchased $25.5 million in the ICO three years earlier.
BitClave did not admit to wrongdoing, but promised to return the $25.5 million raised in the ICO and pay about $4 million in additional fines.
The payment was deposited on November 20 into an escrow account called the Fair Fund distributed by the SEC.
In 2017, BitClave launched its Consumer Activity Token (CAT), which the SEC argued was a securities offering because investors had reason to believe the value of CAT would rise.
According to a 2020 SEC filing, CAT’s white paper states, “(a) As more service providers participate, the amount of CAT required for equivalent services will gradually decrease as the value of CAT increases.”
BitClave also agreed to burn 1 billion uncirculated CAT tokens and request exchange delisting.
The SEC has taken an aggressive regulatory stance on cryptocurrencies under U.S. President Joe Biden, taking more than 100 regulatory actions against companies in the industry.
Last July, President-elect Donald Trump promised to “fire” current SEC Chairman Gary Gensler.
Trump also said he wanted to make the United States the “crypto capital of the world.”
On October 2, Gurbir Grewal, the SEC’s head of enforcement, resigned from his position.
As Cointelegraph reported, Trump is considering creating a new White House post dedicated entirely to cryptocurrency policy. The role will be the first cryptocurrency-related White House post.
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