Crypto case-law precedent
The U.S. court decisions and agency orders that define how securities and commodities law applies to digital assets. Each entry carries the holding, the procedural posture, current status, and verbatim language from the opinion where we have sourced it.
- Howey 1946SEC v. W.J. Howey Co.
The foundational securities-law case. The Supreme Court held that a sale of citrus-grove land coupled with a service contract was an "investment contract," and articulated the test now applied to digital assets: an investment of money, in a common enterprise, with a reasonable expectation of profits, derived from the efforts of others.
- Telegram 2020SEC v. Telegram Group Inc.
The court granted the SEC a preliminary injunction blocking delivery of "Gram" tokens. It treated the pre-sale to sophisticated investors and the anticipated resale into the public market as a single integrated scheme to distribute unregistered securities, rejecting the argument that the later token delivery was a separate, non-securities event.
- LBRY 2022SEC v. LBRY, Inc.
The court granted summary judgment for the SEC, holding that LBRY offered and sold its LBC token as an unregistered security. Critically, it held that a token having a real consumptive or utility use does NOT prevent it from being sold as an investment contract.
- Ooki DAO 2023CFTC v. Ooki DAO
A landmark on the COMMODITY side. The court held that a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a "person" under the Commodity Exchange Act and can be held liable, and that the Ooki DAO ran an illegal off-exchange leveraged/margined retail commodity trading platform.
- Ripple 2023SEC v. Ripple Labs, Inc.
The first major split-decision on token sales. Judge Torres distinguished among three ways XRP was distributed: "Institutional Sales" to sophisticated buyers under written contracts WERE unregistered securities; "Programmatic Sales" to anonymous buyers on exchanges were NOT; and certain other distributions were not investment contracts.
- Terraform 2023SEC v. Terraform Labs Pte. Ltd.
Decided two weeks after Ripple, Judge Rakoff expressly DECLINED to follow Ripple's distinction between institutional and programmatic (secondary-market) buyers, denying the motion to dismiss and creating an open split within the same district.
- Grayscale 2023Grayscale Investments, LLC v. SEC
An administrative-law check on the SEC. The D.C. Circuit unanimously vacated the SEC's denial of Grayscale's bid to convert GBTC into a spot-bitcoin ETP, holding the SEC failed to explain why it approved bitcoin-futures ETPs but rejected a materially similar spot product.
- Coinbase 2024SEC v. Coinbase, Inc.
The court denied Coinbase's motion on nearly all claims, holding the SEC adequately alleged that 13 listed tokens were investment-contract securities, that Coinbase's staking program was an unregistered securities offering, and that Coinbase operated as an unregistered broker, exchange, and clearing agency. Only the "Wallet" software claim was dismissed.