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SEC Clears a Path for a Viable Equity Capital Marketplace with Second No-Action Letter on Angel Crowdfunding
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When the SEC followed up its March 29 “No-Action” letter to an online angel investment platform with a second letter a day later addressing the same issue to a different online angel funding startup, it did something that no-action letters aren’t supposed to do: it made policy. And by successively offering to stand-down from enforcement of the onerous broker-dealer rules governing most equity offerings, it cleared a path, albeit rock-strewn and circuitous, toward a viable crowdsourced equity market – something that the agency has been unable or unwilling to do within the mandates of the JOBS Act. The message delivered by the agency in those letters to the FundersClub and AngelList online angel funding websites was that small but not insignificant amounts of investment capital may be aggregated together through online networks and restricted equity securities distributed in return, without registering as a broker-dealer or as a JOBS Act “crowdfunding portal,” FINRA’s soon-to-be Cinderella stepchild. William Carleton, an attorney that has watched the JOBS Act implementation closely and regularly writes about it at Crowdsourcing.org and his own blog, calls the publication of the two letters “momentus.” While cautioning that no-action letters only establish a “green zone” within which certain activities are allowed given specific conditions and contexts, he still nonetheless believes they were meant to sketch out a framework for exempted crowd fund-raising and investment. “[I]t is fair to say that no-action letters are rarely, if ever, as high profile as these two,” Carleton wrote.