The Pomp Podcast
Marco Santori: The Godfather of Crypto Law
- Marco Santori recounts the earliest federal regulatory conversations about Bitcoin in 2013, when concerns focused on anti-money laundering and prudential safety rather than securities classifications.
- The SAFT (Simple Agreement for Future Tokens) framework emerged as a self-regulatory response to pre-functional token sales (ICOs), applying securities law to speculative token offerings and later enabling consumer protections once tokens became functional.
- ICOs largely disappeared in the US after the SAFT white paper publication, with the SEC later adopting a nuanced "pre-functional vs. post-functional" distinction alongside other factors (concentration, speculative language) to determine securities status.
- Blockchain (the company) prioritizes self-custody and user control over speculation, intentionally staying non-custodial and serving an international user base where traditional banking infrastructure is weakest.
- Airdrops represent a tool for distributing tokens to drive network effects and decentralization while introducing users to crypto without exchange counterparty risk, though curation prevents spam.
- Asset tokenization and distributed ledgers can solve decades-old settlement inefficiencies in legacy securities markets, removing intermediaries and counterparty risk between issuers and beneficial owners.