On 8 November 2020, Vircon Legal co-founder Erdem Mümtaz Hacıpaşaoğlu spoke at the Blockchain Summit organised by the Hacettepe Law Society, addressing blockchain, crypto-assets and the legal questions they raise.
Classification decides everything that follows
“Is it legal?” is almost never the useful question about a crypto-asset. The useful question is what the asset is, because classification determines which regime applies, who supervises it, and what the issuer must disclose. A token that gives access to a working network, a token that represents a claim on future profits, and a token designed to hold a stable value against a currency are three different legal objects that happen to share a technical format.
The distinction between a utility token and a security token is where most disputes begin. The Howey test formalises the analysis in the United States, and its logic (investment of money, common enterprise, expectation of profit from the efforts of others) travels well as a way of stress-testing a project’s own materials. What a team writes in its marketing is evidence of what it was selling, and no later technical document undoes it.
Activity classification matters just as much as asset classification: holding customer keys, matching orders or converting between fiat and crypto brings a business inside the crypto-asset service provider perimeter and the anti-money-laundering obligations attached to it. Our walkthrough is in The CASP Licence in Türkiye; practice page: CASP / Crypto Compliance and Crypto Assets, Web3 & Regulated Digital Markets.
