Irene Energy meets with the French Regulator
Disclaimer: this is not a communication from the AMF and does not reflect any official position from the AMF but only reflects the opinion from the author of the post.
If you want to draw consensus among people at an ICO summit, go with “ICO is a new world and regulations is still at the infancy state”. If you are not here to take sides, move back to the buffet and listen to people debating about the kind and extend of regulation needed. The fact that ICOs will be more strictly regulated seems to be accepted. The question is how and when.
Because the legal framework has not been set yet, we reached out to the French regulator (AMF) — answering an invitation they made to anyone wanting to launch an ICO or sell tokens in France to come and present their project to them first.
When we arrived, the building had just been evacuated for a fire drill. No sense of blind urgency but instead a calm professionalism welcomed us. We presented in front of 6 people with various backgrounds (legal, energy and financial). During the first part of the presentation we explained the economics, business model and value propositions of our project. Our audience showed a real interest on precisely understanding the details of the business. We then carried out with the presentation of the token. The point of the discussion was to assess the legal implications of our token. “Is your token a debt security?” “Is your token an equity security?”
The discussion then moved to more general questions “Who will keep the funds during your token sale?” “Which exchanges will the coins be listed on?”
The last question led to questions around the KYC / AML process we will implement to prevent money laundering.
Which then led to “what is the target audience of your token sale”? And to “what would be included in our Terms and Conditions?”
The most positive part of our discussion was the attitude displayed by our audience. They were interested and very constructive, offering several suggestions and recommendations. “Self-regulate yourself towards best practice” was a general recommendation that came a couple of times and that seems reassuringly pragmatic. A joint message was to be particularly cautious when discussing with retail buyers by clearly laying out all risks associated with the purchase of the token. The clear focus was on protecting retail buyers and led them to offer to have a look at our terms & conditions.
As a conclusion, if you go to the AMF to get a sense of where they stand towards your project (you will not get more than that), prepare a comprehensive overview of your business, your token’s role and your KYC/AML plans.
As a side note, this regulatory perspective was instrumental in motivating our switch from an ERC 20 token using Ethereum to a Stellar powered token. This idea will be developed in later posts but to give you the punchline, using Stellar enable the token creator to vet all future purchasers and holders, by providing him an oversight over the primary market (coins sold as part of the token sale) but also the secondary market (coins bought / sold by users without interaction from the coin issuer).
Irene Energy is a renewable energy supplier powered by the Stellar blockchain and artificial intelligence. It will hold its token sale between February 19th and April 15th 2018.
To know more, please visit us on irene-crowdsale.com
The Irene Energy Team
