South Korea is also considering banning post-US crypto attacks

You may have noticed that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the US financial regulator, halted Kraken’s strike program a few days ago. Kraken was forced to shut down the program immediately after reaching a settlement with the SEC. Now it appears that South Korea is also considering a ban, following US officials.

Hunting cryptographic attacks

It seems that the SEC has launched a hunt for the crypto attack. According to the SEC, Kraken’s gambling program qualifies as an unregistered security. With negotiable rights and/or obligations that represent a financial value, we generally speak of a security in the financial sense of the word. The most obvious forms of this are stocks, bonds, options and futures.

This is also the case with the Kraken attack program, according to the SEC. In principle, qualifying as an effect is not a problem, except that you cannot market it as such. To protect investors, a variety of rules have been put in place before issuers are allowed to sell bonds to the general public.

Kraken assumed with their attack program that it wouldn’t count as an effect, so they don’t have to follow those rules. Unfortunately, the SEC did not approve it, so the program must now be terminated. This could have major implications for other exchange platforms like Coinbase, but today’s news shows that the SEC’s decision could bring other countries to a standstill as well.

Occupation as a future scenario

An associate professor at George Mason Law School in the United States analyzed the SEC decision on Cointelegraph and came to a dangerous conclusion. According to Verret, the SEC could use its ruling on the Kraken attack program as a roadmap for the future.

“There is a pattern emerging from tax authorities and White House decisions regarding crypto that they want to nip in the bud,” Verret said in his analysis.

The industry can only hope that Verret is wrong with his analysis and that there are ways to go about it differently. However, the SEC’s harsh ruling on the Kraken attack program seems to leave little room for that.

South Korea follows

After the SEC’s ruling on February 9 on the Kraken attack program, the discussion also started in South Korea. First, it is a study whose methods and time frame are currently unknown. What we do know at this point is that cryptocurrency staking is not currently defined in South Korean law.

On the phone, a spokesperson for the Treasury Department told South Korea’s News 1: “I understand it has recently been reported as an issue in the United States.”

“The current position of the authorities is that there is still no problem because nothing has been done,” the spokesman said in the interview. With that in mind, South Korean authorities actually seem to be in the early stages of their investigation into cryptographic attacks. So there is no reason for immediate concern yet, but it is not a positive development.

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