The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has busted yet another initial coin offering (ICO), this time Tierion for issuing TNT tokens for securities law violations. The US financial regulator issued a cease and desist order against the blockchain company and ordered it to refund all tokens back to investors. Tierion raised $25 million in July 2017 by selling 350 million TNT tokens. The SEC has alleged that the TNT tokens fall under the category of securities, and Tierion did not register them with the regulator.
Tierion was fined $250,000 and have to disable the trading of its tokens.
The blockchain company was fined $250,000 and have to disable trading of its tokens on the secondary market. “While Tierion had been in business as a SaaS company since 2015, the Tierion Network was still in development at the time of the ICO. Reasonable investors would have understood that their money was funding the Tierion Network’s continued development,” the SEC noted. The ICO investors and TNT holders have 60 days to approach the company to refund their investments at cost, with interest.
The blockchain firm did not agree or deny the allegations.
Tierion agreed to the settlement with the US SEC, but it did not agree or deny any allegations. In a Medium post, Wayne Vaughan, Founder and the CEO of Tierion, said that the project would go ahead despite the SEC’s order. “This SEC settlement and waiver allows Tierion to complete the retirement of the TNT token and to move forward without a heavy regulatory burden. This announcement does not impact the availability of Tierion’s current products or open-source software,” Vaughan noted. Earlier, SEC filed a lawsuit against the blockchain giant Ripple over its ICO.
