Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

The breakdown is sponsored by nexus.io, Circle, and FtX, and produced and distributed by CoinDess.

What's going on, guys? It is Sunday, October 9th, and that means it's time for Long

Reads Sunday. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown,

please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive

deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash

breakdown pod. Also a disclosure, as always, in addition to them being a sponsor of the show, I also

work with FTX. All right, folks. Well, today for Long Read Sunday, we are diving into one of the long-term

thornyest issues in crypto, and that is whether tokens constitute securities.

This is a conversation that has never really gone too far out of view when it comes to

crypto and regulation. It certainly has had spiking moments of relevance,

such as during the ICO boom in 2017 and early 2018, but even to this day remains one of the

most contentious questions. The answer to it has implications for which body should oversee

cryptocurrencies and what the rules around them should be. It's something that legislation that has

been proposed, such as the Responsible Financial Innovation Act, comes at explicitly. In that act,

for example, there is a new definition of ancillary assets which are sort of security-like

commodities that, to some extent, change over time. The conversation around whether tokens are securities has come

more into view recently, based both on the Gary Gensler-led SEC's push for broader power

to oversee crypto, as well as in discussions around the Ethereum merge. One of the narratives

on crypto-Twitter, or more specifically if we're being honest, Bitcoin Twitter, was that the

shift from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake might actually make Ethereum more security-like.

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