The SEC kills ICO celebrity endorsements

Howard Marks
Raising the Entrepreneurial Boom
2 min readNov 2, 2017
High tea with Paris Hilton — Yum

It was just a matter of time before the SEC started to pay attention to what is really going on with ICO marketing. Celebrities like Floyd Mayweather, Paris Hilton, and Jamie Foxx have been busy sending tweets and posting on social networks their endorsements for ICOs. Really? What would they really know about blockchain architecture? And did they read the whitepapers that they were promoting? Probably not. What they did do is receive tokens in exchange for promoting the ICOs. The problem is this: According to the SEC, it might be illegal.

The boxer is an ICO promoter

The new SEC bulletin contains a nuance that might be lost on some people. In the release, they basically are saying that ICOs promoted by celebrities are securities and therefore subject to the advertising rules mandated by the SEC. Anyone who promotes the sale of securities for compensation must disclose it. These ICOsconsider themselves to be utility tokens, and the lawyers who represent these celebrities bought into it. This is the part that is not really clear. How can sophisticated lawyers allows their clients to take partin the sale of ICOs given all of the legal controversies?

Is greed that important for these millionaires?

The blockchain is a very important technological innovation and it will survive all the craziness associated with it. It is important to note that we are seeing more support by the crypto community for regulation. The reason is simple: when Floyd Mayweather tweeted his ICO, it is clear that at this point ICOs jumped the shark.

Come join over 15 top attorneys and pundits at the StartEngine ICO 2.0 Summit to discuss how we can bring ICOs out of the shadows and help grow it into a large marketplace.

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Howard Marks
Raising the Entrepreneurial Boom

CEO at StartEngine and co-founder at Activision/Blizzard. Raise capital with equity crowdfunding on www.startengine.com