Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin says no chance ETH is classed as security
Ethereum co-founder and crypto entrepreneur Joseph Lubin is confident that Ether (ETH) won’t be classified as a security in the United States.
Cointelegraph spoke with Lubin, Ethereum co-founder and founder of blockchain tech firm ConsenSys, in Tel Aviv at the Web3 event, Building Blocks 23.
Asked if ETH could be classed as a security in the U.S. after Ethereum’s transition to a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus model, Lubin said:
“There would be a tremendous outcry from not just the crypto community but different politicians and certain regulators,” he added.
In September, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler suggested that the blockchain’s transition to PoS might have brought ETH under the regulators’ beat.
Gensler believed staking coins gave “the investing public” anticipation of “profits based on the efforts of others.”
Lubin said he was privy to discussions with the SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission “for many years.”
He said around five years ago the regulators were “just trying to wrap their heads around what tokens were.”
Lubin, however, believes that ETH continues to be “sufficiently decentralized” and pointed to its “many use cases that don’t implicate it as a security.”
“There is no centralized set of promoters or builders that is specifically trying to raise the value of Ether and enrich investors,” he added.
Lubin said that regulators appear to be more focused on another aspect of Ethereum at the moment, noting that people he knows close to the action in Washington D.C. say “most of the focus is on stablecoins right now.”
In a Feb. 9 Twitter thread, Coinbase founder and CEO Brian Armstrong responded to “rumors” that the SEC was thinking to ban retail consumers from staking crypto.
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