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Comment by junofan | Hacker News Reader

They were running it out of a Delaware LLC formed in 2017? Am I reading that correctly? That’s not standard practice now for obvious reasons. I don’t think many people in the industry will care about this case, but I could be wrong.

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It’s pretty cheap common for crypto startups to incorporate as a Delaware corp. Then when you launch the protocol or token you establish a Caymans/BVI/Swiss foundation.

The Delaware corp acts as a service provider to the offshore foundation. The DAO and it’s treasury are directly tied to the BVI foundation.

The advantage of this is that if the equity ends up having value in addition to the token, then you have a nice Delaware corp to wrap that equity value in.

I've seen similarly flavored incorporation structures with crypto hedge funds, where there's a management firm LLC incorporated onshore, and a holdco offshore where any of the funds flow is happening -- the advantage there being that one can trade on any of the major exchanges without being tied to US regs.

Very interesting to see similar structures with crypto startups as they launch protocols/foundation tokens. I guess the commonalities have to do with the treasury aspects, right?

The fraud aspect.

What are the obvious reasons?

To avoid the jurisdiction of the SEC.

But what changed? Not from US, missing context.

My interpretation of peyton’s comment was that the crypto industry players these days incorporate in places with more legal and regulatory flexibility than the US these days, not that something has changed in US regulations to make Delaware less favorable.

Or in other words "wait, they actually incorporated in the US and not on the Cayman Islands or in Hong Kong or in $Obscure South Pacific Country You Never Heard Of? Amateurs!"

Is it just me or does this raise more red flags than a soviet parade?

If an industry needs "more legal flexibility" that just screams scam to me.

>If an industry needs "more legal flexibility" that just screams scam to me

IIRC Stem cell reserarch is limited in the USA given the puritanism in its society and laws.

I wouldn't say that Stem Cell therapy is a scam per se.

Sometimes, laws fall behind progress in some countries.

Thats a good point. Let me fix my claim: If a financial product needs "legal flexibility", it's most likely a scam.

The conclusion I draw is that scams form around unregulated industries.

Here in mu country there are A LOT of stem cell related scams. But that doesn't mean there's not some real R&D going on .

Stem Cell Therapy has a fairly obvious use case though. Ten years in, the most popular use cases for crypto appear to be speculation, financial crime and money laundering.

Stem Cell Therapy is going on 24 years now (1998). This argument is flawed too.

Well, so stem cell research is avoiding US laws because of Puritanism.

Why is crypto avoiding US laws?

Edit: Also, a quick Google of top stem cell research companies show that they are based in the U.S. or Europe, so I’m not sure how correct the claim of US avoidance is. But even if they are avoiding the U.S., they are choosing Europe instead, where “legal flexibility” is still not a thing.

The US doesn’t have crypto legislation AFAIK. Just a hodgepodge of rules from various power brokers. Other jurisdictions do a better job. IANAL, so take with grain of salt.

All insurance is in Bermuda. The federal reserve used cayman entities to send stimulus checks. Most not for profit orgs in the USA use Puerto Rican or offshore hedge funds to avoid withholding

Bermuda has a lot of reinsurance that I know of. What insurance are you referring to?

> The federal reserve used cayman entities to send stimulus checks.

This is a heck of a claim given that stimulus checks were issued by the US Treasury, not the Fed.

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