Block.One is the useful test case, because it ran with the strongest disclosure a buyer could ask for and no rulebook would ever require: the founder, Brendan Blumer, told American Banker on the record that the EOS token had "no purpose" [9], the story ran when the year-long sale had taken in $700 million, and the sale closed at $4 billion [8], which means roughly $3.3 billion, about 5.7 times what was already in the pot, arrived after buyers could read that sentence [1]. On the column's own estimate of more than $20 billion raised across 2018 [6], that one offering was near a fifth of the market [2].
That is the behaviour the proposed exemption inherits [1]. Note what the commission is not doing: it is not defending the stance it sketched about a decade ago, that these are securities offerings belonging inside the registration regime [2], nor the 2018 finding that ended the boom [5], and it is spending scarce rulemaking attention on the distribution side while the market-structure bill sits on a congressional calendar owned by more pressing business [3]. American Banker describes the agency as wading into that legislative vacuum gingerly [4].
The counter-thesis sits in the same column, and it is the stronger half of it: take the laborious manual work of raising capital, digitise and automate it, and the process gets faster and more open to the public, which the column reckons needs only one tweak to the system already in place [12]. I cannot price the proposal against that, because the source material does not carry the terms that would decide it, namely the dollar ceiling and what disclosure and resale limits ride along with it. If the exempt path costs more per dollar raised than registration, smaller issuers ignore it and the on-ramp carries no traffic. If it costs almost nothing and conditions little, the 2016 to 2018 distribution curve comes back with a filing fee attached, and the base rate to beat is that same $20 billion producing a handful of projects that were not schemes or frauds [6][7].
This is probably wrong, but the more interesting version of the thesis is that the fight is over the definition rather than the fraud: The DAO, launched in the spring of 2016, did nothing beyond raise money [11], and it broke no law, because there were no rules for it to break [10]. An exemption changes who may sell and on what paperwork, not what the buyer ends up holding, which is precisely the column's objection to working around the plain reality that tokens sold as an investment are securities [13]. Everything turns on the ceiling.
