SEC Staff Gives Canton Coin Conditional No-Action Relief on Minting

The SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance staff on Nov. 3 described Canton Coin as a “digital commodity” and said it would not recommend enforcement over specified programmatic minting under the facts presented in a request.

The position covers programmatic minting by Super Validators, Validators and application providers as described in the request. It applies to activity without registration under Section 5 of the Securities Act or Section 12(g) of the Exchange Act. The staff’s view relied on representations that the token’s value comes from the network’s programmatic operation and supply-and-demand dynamics, and that the network has no “central party.”

The response is limited to those representations and does not provide a legal conclusion. Different facts could lead to a different outcome.

Six days earlier, on Oct. 28, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) launched a tokenization service that creates tokenized representations of assets held by its subsidiary, the Depository Trust Company. The service is integrated with Canton Network and DTCC’s private Besu network.