Are NFTs Securities? with Securities Lawyer Brian Frye
Bankless
Bankless
4.7 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 4 January 2023
⏱️ 82 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
David has been obsessed with this topic for the last couple weeks. It's time to get to the bottom of this: Are NFTs securities?
On the way down this rabbit hole, we found lawyer Brian Frye, who has some fascinating and novel takes on this very issue.
Brian is a law professor at the University of Kentucky, and recently wrote an article in Coindesk titled “NFTs Are Securities and It’s Great.”
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Topics Covered:
0:00 Intro
7:30 Are All NFTs Securities?
14:00 Triggered by the Word
19:30 Trolling the SEC
29:20 A Really Good Tool
36:00 New Securities
44:55 Use a Different Term
53:30 Creative Assets
1:01:00 Copyright Law and Clout Sales
1:09:30 A Medium of Value Capture
1:14:00 Public Goods
1:19:00 Closing
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Recources:
Brian Frye
https://twitter.com/brianlfrye
After Copyright: Pwning NFTs in a Clout Economy
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3971240
Securities Spectrum:
https://imgur.com/8jt6OZ1
NFTs are Securities and It's Great
https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2022/12/28/nfts-are-securities-and-its-great/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Bankless Nation, another state of the nation for you. |
| 0:05.2 | The first one of the year, our first live stream of the year as well, are NFT's securities. |
| 0:10.6 | David, you have been obsessed with this topic for the last couple of weeks and wanted |
| 0:14.4 | to do a show on it. |
| 0:16.0 | I was a little hesitant at first, maybe we'll get into a little bit why, but what are we |
| 0:20.9 | going to cover today and what's the topic? |
| 0:22.9 | Yeah, I've been going down the securities law rabbit hole, which is actually a place |
| 0:27.7 | where I started my crypto journey. |
| 0:29.2 | A lot of people don't really know this line, but my first foray into crypto was first |
| 0:33.0 | with an ICO advisory company, and that company ground to a halt because we realized that |
| 0:37.5 | everything we were doing was a security. |
| 0:39.7 | And so the way I got through the 2018 bear market was working inside of the world of security |
| 0:44.3 | tokens. |
| 0:45.3 | And so going back down the security token rabbit hole has been extremely interesting, and |
| 0:50.1 | I think that there are a ton of lessons that we as an industry need to learn about why |
| 0:54.8 | do securities law exist? |
| 0:57.1 | What is this word security? |
| 0:59.2 | Why do we have the SEC and why does our guest Brian think that all NFTs are securities? |
| 1:05.0 | And also why might that not be such a bad thing? |
| 1:08.3 | These are all fantastic questions. |
| 1:09.9 | Yeah, I'm actually super bullish on this episode because I think we get to kind of the |
| 1:13.8 | base principles of why securities laws exist in the first place, and that's really where |
... |
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