The financial industry used to be able to make đ© up so đ€·ââïž investors would hand over their đ”. Then the United States passed securities laws and started to crack down on people ginning up public investment based on wild or outright false promises of future returns.
This made Wall Street very đ€Ź.
As decades passed, those folks eventually had to accept the SEC, but a new generation of finance bros have shaken off the strictures of Wall Street and moved to the crypto industry (which doesnât have a âStreetâ as much as digital tokens denoting partial ownership of a road that doesnât exist).
And they think they are very, very clever. Some of them had an idea: instead of promising a profit, maybe we can skirt the ENTIRE SECURITIES LAW REGIME by using some emojis instead!
Well done, you guys!
Judge Victor Marrero was less impressed with the argument that securities law withers in the face of pictograms. Without quoting Oliver Twist, the judge decided that if the law supposed that, the law is an ass.
In an ongoing class action alleging various securities law violations by the folks behind the Tweet above, Judge Marrero denied the motion to dismiss noting, inter alia, that those emojis have meaning. And that meaning may have implications for the outcome of the case.
Each Tweet promotes a recent sale or statistics of recent sales of Moments on the Marketplace. And although the literal word âprofitâ is not included in any of the Tweets, the ârocket shipâ emoji, âstock chartâ emoji, and âmoney bagsâ emoji objectively mean one thing: a financial return on investment.
Emojis can mean multiple things. Iâve already used the chocolate ice cream emoji and you definitely didnât read it that way. But a money bag isnât even coy! Seriously, you canât avoid laws just by using pictures the same way you can avoid any semblance of actual value by using JPEGs.
This opinion has irritated the people youâd expect.
One Twitter user described the news as âtragic,â while another pointed out that freedom of speech no longer extends to emojis.
Yeah, thatâs what happened. How do people this stupid survive? The act of inhaling has to tax the medulla oblongata more than understanding that fraudulent statements arenât protected by the First Amendment.
Oscar Franklin Tan, the chief legal officer of NFT platform Enjin, also commented on the issue. Tan told Cointelegraph that the Dapper Labs decision should not create a âdangerous ruleâ that emojis make NFTs securities.â Tan explained that:
âCourts should protect the edgy, freewheeling messaging in NFT communities because shitposts and emojis are part of free speech too.â
According to Tan, sneaker resellers can also use the same âFOMO,â or âfear of missing outâ pitch and use the emojis cited in the case.
I think a lot of bankers in the 1930s wanted the courts to protect âedgy, freewheeling messagingâ too, but we decided against âprivileging scam artists for the LOLs.â Sorry, I meant for the đ. Honestly, the crypto world shifts between this nouveau-goldbug, libertarian âwe will replace all world currencyâ messaging and âshitposting about monkey pictures is a core valueâ enough to give anyone whiplash.
Now, maybe thereâs something to the argument that NFTs arenât properly âsecuritiesâ and maybe that gets the defendants out of this case. And even if they are securities, these specific emoji messages might not be fraudulent statements. But emojis are statements, even if they are used to convey implied meanings.
That shouldnât be particularly controversial. Unless youâre a đ€Ą.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if youâre interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
