Hong Kong Web3 firm Animoca’s bet on non-US markets offers buffer from SEC’s labelling of Sand token as security
- Animoca said it has been focused on ‘more progressive jurisdictions’, as its token for The Sandbox was named by the SEC in lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase
- Other companies like Ripple are also looking elsewhere while Coinbase fights the SEC allegations that could have a chilling effect on the US crypto market
Sand is the native crypto token used by Animoca’s metaverse platform The Sandbox, and it was one of more than a dozen such tokens to have been explicitly named by the SEC as securities, with others including Solana, Polygon and Mana, the token used in the Decentraland virtual world. The SEC action raises legal risks for any companies selling these tokens.
“Animoca Brands is not focused on a single territory but operates globally,” company co-founder and chairman Yat Siu said via email. “The SEC focuses on the US, so that should not have an impact on Animoca Brands in broader markets where Sand is widely available and accepted, including in more progressive jurisdictions like Hong Kong and Japan.”
Animoca has already “started to take steps to place more emphasis on other markets”, Siu added, because of the recent “blockchain-hostile” approach in the US.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has said that Coinbase has no plans to delist the tokens named by the SEC, setting it up for a legal fight over what types of crypto constitute a security.