Decentralized Exchange OpenRelay Changes Policies after SEC EtherDelta Actions

OpenRelay Implements New Policies

OpenRelay, a Kansas-based decentralized cryptocurrency exchange (DEX), said on Monday that it would take several steps to ensure that the company respects US laws and regulations. The move is prompted by the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) actions against another DEX, EtherDelta, whose founder was charged and fined for operating an unregistered securities exchange, last week.

OpenRelay will change its terms of use and will make them obligatory for users, the firm’s founder, Austin Roberts, explained in a blog post. Until now, the policies have been voluntary, but soon every trader will be allowed to make orders only after signing the updated measures.

Moreover, the company will add a blacklist of tokens that seem to be securities, and those assets will be barred from trading. OpenRelay will allow some of the blacklisted assets to use other types of services on the platform.

“OpenRelay was built to accept orders for any asset pairs supported by the 0x protocol. So far we have not developed any capability to restrict specific assets or asset pairs from being traded, but to ensure that we can avoid the exchange of securities, we will implement blacklist capabilities and begin to proactively maintain a blacklist,” Roberts said in the post.

Changes in Trading Widgets and Toolkit

OpenRelay offers various open source products to third parties and those services will also be affected by the new provisions. For example, the Kansas company is now considering to allow other projects to offer securities by using its function for order pools only in the cases when those crypto initiatives can handle the legal issues.

OpenRelay has already made changes to its widget toolkit product. This toolkit is a service that helps users to start trading Ethereum-based virtual coins on their own websites. The toolkit has a list of available cryptocurrencies.

“Our mistake was that we had not reviewed the tokens for whether or not they might be construed as a security,” Roberts explained. “To ensure compliance with securities law, we have drastically reduced the list of tokens supported by our trading widgets to ones we are confident are not securities. Once we come up with a review process, we will start adding tokens back into our trading widgets.”