According to JPMorgan, the US Congress could transfer Ethereum to “another category” so as not to classify the asset as a security in order to protect investors. The bank’s strategists have reacted in this way to the publication of the so-called “Hinman documents” as part of the SEC proceedings against Ripple Labs. Last June 13, the court officially released information related to a 2018 speech by former regulator employee William Hinman. In his former speech, the agency’s former director of corporate finance claimed that, for some reason, Bitcoin and Ethereum are not securities. According to JPMorgan, Congress could consider Ethereum a commodity, like BTC, or put it in “another category” with less onerous rules. The study says: “A similar decision regarding Ethereum and other fairly decentralized cryptocurrencies will prevent these from being classified as securities.” According to the published documents, some SEC officials at the time expressed concern about the mention of ETH in comments on the draft speech. For example, one of them stated that “the fact that tokens on a sufficiently decentralized network are no longer securities” creates a “regulatory gap.”
