Golden Finance reported that the U.S. Department of Justice announced that HYDRO founder Shane Hampton and financial engineering director Michael Kane were convicted of manipulating the price of Hydrogen Technology's HYDRO token. The law enforcement agency also stated that the two's sale of HYDRO constituted an unregistered investment contract, and the two were sentenced to two years and eleven months and three years and nine months in prison respectively. The investigation found that the two hired a third-party company, Moonwalkers Trading Limited in South Africa, to use automatic robots to put $7 million worth of fake transactions and more than $300 million worth of fake orders into the HYDRO market. Nicole Argentieri, head of the U.S. Department of Justice's criminal division, said: "Shane Hampton, Michael Kane and their accomplices used trading robots to manipulate the price of their company's cryptocurrency to defraud investors. This is the first time a jury in a federal criminal trial has determined that cryptocurrency is a security and that manipulating the price of cryptocurrency is securities fraud."