Crypto coins surge as SEC spares Ether

washington/new york — Ether investors got a reprieve when a top US regulator said transactions involving the token aren’t subject to federal securities rules, ending months of speculation that had weighed on the second-most valuable digital currency. Ether and other coins surged on the news.

“Putting aside the fundraising that accompanied the creation of Ether, based on my understanding of the present state of Ether, the Ethereum network and its decentralized structure, current offers and sales of Ether are not securities transactions,” William Hinman, who heads the Securities and Exchange Commission’s division of corporation finance, said in remarks prepared for a Yahoo Finance conference in San Francisco.

“And, as with Bitcoin, applying the disclosure regime of the federal securities laws to current transactions in Ether would seem to add little value.”

Ether rose 10 per cent to $518.94 at 4:15pm in New York. Bitcoin, the most valuable digital token, jumped 5.9 per cent to $6,630.73 in its biggest rally in over a month.

Crypto enthusiasts have long worried that the SEC would crack down on Ether, which was originally offered in 2014 by the Ethereum Foundation, a Swiss nonprofit. It’s now widely used in new crypto projects across the globe and some worried that if the regulator subjected it to securities rules that those efforts would have been disrupted.