According to TechFlow, on August 28, the NFT trading platform OpenSea officially announced that it had received a Wells Notice from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The SEC threatened to sue the company, believing that the NFTs on its platform may constitute securities. Devin Finzer, co-founder and CEO of OpenSea, responded strongly on social media, saying that the company was shocked by the SEC's move and was ready to stand up and fight for the entire industry. Finzer emphasized that NFTs are essentially creative products, including artworks, collectibles, game props, domain names, and event tickets, and should not be regulated in the same way as financial products such as collateralized debt obligations. He said: "We should not regulate digital art in the same way as collateralized debt obligations."
To support the development of the industry, OpenSea has pledged $5 million to help NFT creators and developers who received Wells' notice pay legal fees. Finzer pointed out that the cryptocurrency industry has long been a regulatory target of the SEC, including companies such as Coinbase, Uniswap, Robinhood, Kraken, and Consensys, which are fighting the SEC's "enforcement-style regulation" approach. However, he believes that this move against NFTs has entered uncharted territory and may stifle innovation on a broader scale, affecting hundreds of thousands of online artists and creators.
