Since the hype of ICOs in 2017, many authorities and institutions took action to establish a legal framework and general guidelines. Since the DAO failed to see this (see Chapter 4, ICOs and Tokenized Fundraising Methods), the US SEC undertook efforts to fit the new asset class into US laws.
The case of the DAO is significant because it caused an investigation by the US SEC into defining tokens as financial securities or utilities. The SEC released its report of investigation in July 2017 (one month after the DAO's failures) stating that DAO tokens should have been subject to security laws because they were labeled as such. This was one of the first initiatives toward regulating cryptoassets, at least in the US. The SEC advanced this immense task to a globally agreed perspective on tokens and gave out a starting point for categorizing...
