Spain’s Securities Regulator Says It Has Not Authorized Any Entities to Operate ICOs

The Spanish National Securities Market Commission (CNMV) has affirmed that it has not authorized any entity to operate an initial coin offering (ICO) with the agency’s official sanction. The news was reported by Cointelegraph en Español on March 27.

The regulator issued an official announcement on March 26, which underscored that the agency had to date neither approved nor exercised any power of authorization or vetting of any project in the ICO sector.

CNMV thus stressed that any white paper or other documentation sent to prospective ICO investors should include a disclaimer clarifying that it has not “been subject to any type of review by the CNMV or any other administrative authority," or similar phrasing to that effect.

Any ICO-related documentation that asserts otherwise is inappropriate, the regulator stressed, unless the text has formally been reviewed or approved by the agency in advance.

The agency further added that its regulatory oversight has thus far been confined to confirming that in the case of tokens that are deemed to be securities, token sales below a certain threshold do not require approval from the regulator. This threshold is determined to be a token issuance of less than 5 million euros, targeting fewer than 150 retail investors — or otherwise in cases where the minimum investment per investor is set at least 100,000 euros.

The agency added the caveat, however, that:

"This, logically, is independent of the fact that the participation of an investment services company may be necessary, in accordance with the provisions of article 35.3 of the LMV [Spanish Securities Market Act] and in the terms set out in the criteria published by the CNMV in this regard."

As previously reported, in January of this year, the CNMV added 23 unauthorized forex and cryptocurrency entities to its warning list. Among them was a forex and crypto exchange that had also been flagged by the Polish Financial Supervision Authority for operating in Poland without the required license.