The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is slowly taking action towards Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) that misleadingly use blockchain in their names.
According to reports from Bloomberg, issuers are not able to use ‘materially deceptive or misleading’ names under the Investment Company Act of 1940. As a result of this, more than a third of thematic ETFs had to change their names last year during the SECs approval process. For example, one fund that originally included blockchain in its name is now called a ‘transformational data sharing’ ETF.
The Chief executive officer of Exchange Traded Concepts, J. Garret Stevens said,
“We get questions more than we used to where we have to be able to defend our name. Now, almost all names, they’ll come back and say ‘Can you justify [and]give us your explanation on why this name is OK?”
Corporate Traveller is a UK based provider of business travel management services to small business companies, and they have recently announced a partnership with BitPay, which will allow Corporate Traveller to accept Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash payments from its customers.
The brand leader at Corporate Traveller, Andy Hedley spoke in a press release saying, “we identified an increasing demand from our clients for the option to pay in bitcoin for business travel bookings made by our travel consultants.”
Following on from this he said:
“We chose BitPay to manage our merchant processing because they make it easy, and handle the entire process of getting the bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash from the customer and depositing cash into our account. The blockchain industry is growing exponentially, and we are excited to be able to offer our clients the ability to pay in bitcoin, whilst having the reassurance of our settlement from BitPay being in pounds sterling. We believe Corporate Traveller is the first business travel management company to offer this payment option to [SMBs] in the U.K.
Meanwhile, whilst recovering from the devasting fire that took Notre-Dame cathedral last night, France has asked the European Union to adopt the same kind of crypto regulatory framework that it only integrated last week.
Speaking at a blockchain tech event in Pairs, the French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said:
“I will propose to my European partners that we set up a single regulatory framework on crypto assets, inspired by the French experience.”
Read more at: https://cryptodaily.co.uk/2019/04/sec-taking-action-misleading-etfs
