What Is an ICO Anyway? A Few Theories

Here is a sensible memo from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati about the legal status of initial coin offerings. Like me, they are very skeptical that you can get around U.S. securities laws just by calling something a "utility token": If you sell people a token that they can't currently use to do stuff, and they use the token mainly to speculate on the future value of your platform, then that is a security even if one day they may end up using it to buy cloud storage. That raises further questions:

I agree with them that that is the only really sensible dividing line: If people mostly use your token to buy cloud storage, then it is prepaid cloud storage; if they mostly use it to speculate, then it is a security. But I also agree with them that the SEC hasn't said that, and it's not entirely obvious as a legal answer.