SEC Goes After Another Crypto Firm, Slaps Immutable With Wells Notice

The firm's IMX token is down over 13% at $1.16 following the announcement.

Web3 gaming firm Immutable has been slapped with a subpoena by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over its IMX token, the company said in a statement on Friday.

The firm said the notice was served hours after the company’s “first interaction” with the SEC, and “cited statutory provisions and contained limited meaningful detail about the nature of the investigation.”

“With this action, the SEC is continuing to indiscriminately assert that tokens are securities. While not specified in the notice, we believe its claims are targeting the listing and private sales of IMX in 2021,” Immutable said, referencing a blog post about a pre-launch private purchase of Immutable’s token IMX by Huobi Ventures Blockchain Fund.

The firm’s IMX token slipped over 13% at $1.16 over the past 24 hours.

A subpoena is a court order that compels a person or company to produce documents or appear in court. Several high profile crypto companies have received such notices over the past few years including Coinbase, Consensys, Ripple, OpenSea and Crypto.com.

The CEO of Immutable and the Digital Worlds Foundation, the parent entity of the issuer of Immutable’s IMX token, also received separate notices. Immutable also said it was aware of “related inquiries, but no actual or proposed legal action, from the DOJ.”

“To manufacture a case on a listing that occurred in 2021, with practically no direct communication with the company, is precisely the reason the industry is so skeptical of any attempts from this SEC to argue it is attempting to provide clarity,” it said.

“Despite the SEC indiscriminately claiming that tokens across the industry are securities, we are confident the IMX token is not. If the manner of providing clarity to the industry is by winning against this attempted regulation by enforcement, then Immutable is happy to do so.”

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Callan Quinn is a Hong Kong-based news reporter at CoinDesk. She holds more than $1,000 of ETH.