France plans to legalize ICO
On September 13, French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said on Twitter that the parliament decided to legalize ICO eligible status. The companies raising ICO have to submit application to the French committee, which only grant projects providing specific guarantees to investors, according to ICO Examiner News.
The new policy is part of reforms promoted by the French President Emmanuel Macron through Parliament. As a part of his campaign, Macron is committed to conduct a PACTE (the Action Plan for Business Growth and Transformation) to create “business friendly” political environment for France economy.
An innovation teams grouped by various political parties within the European Parliament met last Tuesday to review the issues existing within ICO principles that will reform a part of crowd-funding framework. The proposal was edited by Ashley Fox, a member of the European Parliament. A part of proposal states to limit a cap up to €8 million for anti-money laundering. If the European Parliament approves the proposal, it sets standards for token sales allowing the project party to raise ICO funds and conduct business within any of the 28 member states.
ICO (Initial Coin Offering) in other words, is the IPO of blockchain, generally refers to the blockchain-based startup project on ICO platforms to issue the cryptocurrency (corresponding to IPO stocks), investors to make ICO tokens purchase using Bitcoin and cryptocurrency (such as Ethereum, Litecoin, etc) to achieve fundraising. The tokens held by the investor represents the shares of the projects. Once the project landed, the value of these tokens as a trading medium and equity becomes increasing and transferable. Then the investors monetarily liquidate the tokens on stablecoins supported exchanges (mostly with Tether coin which is the largest, most liquidated stablecoin among the time).
ICO combines the advantages of IPOs and VC, and seems to be more convenient in terms of regulation and circulation, such as high efficiency (often completed within a day, some eventually within a few minutes), good liquidity (easier to transfer tokens), less private information required and lower entry requirements that have made ICO a hot financing pattern. (thanks to the cryptocurrency foundation community that make plenty of ICOs founded. Especially in [Ethereum community]( has more than 496 identified tokens based on ERC20.
As more and more companies has started to load ICO to attract more interest from individuals and investors, meanwhile governments and regulators starts to pay attention. For regulators and governments, those investments are often recognized as dangerous fraud primarily viewed with suspicion. These ICOs are audited mainly by governments around the world, but they yet followed any precedent. In fact, disagreements between countries over the entire cryptocurrency space have taken a different approach to managing it. (After Bitcoin Cash succeeding, more than 44 hard forks were founded in Bitcoin Community, claimed to be better than Bitcoin. Nevertheless, more than 30 forks were recognized as scams).
In general, European countries permitted the existence of ICO. Among them, except Russia in a more restricted environment, other countries, including Great Britain, France, and Germany hold different opinions and have set up special departments to investigate the pros and cons in relevance with cryptocurrency, or to strengthen supervision. On early August, the Stuttgart Stock Exchange in Germany, announced that it planed to develop an ICO platform that would permit token issuance through standardized and transparent processes.
In a global perspective, Asia are the strictest to cryptocurrency, including China and South Korea that explicitly banned ICO (since Bitcoin price rapidly trended up on November to January). The South Korean government has established ICO ban in September last year. In fact, the voice for legalization of ICO in Korea has never been silent. On December 6 2017, a senior officials of the Korea Financial Services Commission revealed that FSC plans to introduce regulatory on bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and may revised the ban. On March 2017, the Korea Times mentioned financial regulators were discussing with the Korean tax authorities, the Ministry of Justice and other relevant government departments to reintroduce ICO under certain specific conditions. The reason why the Korean government is uncertain about the ICO is that it hopes the legalization of ICO can bring up a rapid development of blockchain technology. On the other hand, the government seems want to retain retain the huge value of blockchain business.
On August 2018, the Chinese biggest social media WeChat has suspended 8 major cryptocurrency-related accounts for calls of government. WeChat and Alipay also started to ban transactions related to cryptocurrency. On August 23 and 29, Beijing and Guangzhou announced to ban any cryptocurrency promotion.
Blockchain technology has a great future and becomes a trend of civilization development. As a type of financing patterns, ICO has innovation and risk coexisted and constant influence to the future. Only establishing regulation, however can reintroduce a long-term development. In order to usher in long-term sustainable normative development. In recent, the Bank of China Insurance Supervision and Management Committee published a research paper on its official website, officially defined ICO and stated that cryptocurrency-related activities is eligible to operate under a supervision. It is a good news the Chinese government about to explore the future development of cryptocurrency and blockchain as when China once had largest liquidity over time.
Although there are many bypassed regulation and they have tasted a small piece of candy, but undergoing the lack of supervision is precisely the main reason why cryptocurrency glitched into an embarrassing situation as when it is yet accepted widely. However, with more regulations introduced, it is believed that cryptocurrency will become greater.
Data for market analyzing collectively obtained from citicoins.com