Initial coin offerings (ICOs), initial exchange offerings (IEOs), and security token offerings (STOs) are a worldwide phenomenon. After all, a coin or token that has no physical existence apart from some computer code can be easily sent around the world to anyone with an internet connection with a few clicks of a keyboard. While the…
Trustless payment methods were the first disruption blockchain brought to the financial industry. The second wave of disruption came about when the ICO boomed in 2017 as a way to reach a larger market of investors through crowdfunding smart contracts on Ethereum. In 2017 alone, ICOs raised around $7 billion. More recently, we’re seeing the…
Key Highlights The Kik case is the first case that the SEC has brought in litigation that has been contested by the company where there are no allegations of fraud “The SEC has made clear that virtually all ICOs are going to be treated as offerings of securities.” Even if a company is offering ICOs…
This is the first part of an insight series by Tanner De Witt partner, Pádraig Walsh, in which he gives his legal perspective on security token offerings. In this article, he starts from the basics, and asks and answers what are security token offerings and why we should care. What is a token? A token…
Rillet, a San Francisco-based startup founded in 2024, has reached a $1 billion valuation in roughly two years, securing $100 million in a Series C round that came together in less than 48 hours. This latest funding, which brings the company’s total raised to over $200 million across three rounds in just 14 months, highlights…
The Federal Trade Commission has initiated at least 13 enforcement actions since launching Operation AI Comply in September 2024. Every one of these cases targets marketing deception—what is commonly called AI washing—rather than the actual behavior of the software. While the agency is aggressively policing the gap between vendor promises and tool capabilities, the internal…
The New Jersey Fair Price Protection Act (FPPA), signed into law on July 23, 2026, establishes a significant shift in the liability landscape for developers of autonomous pricing systems. By introducing a private right of action for data-driven pricing violations, the legislation creates a direct avenue for class-action litigation that did not previously exist. While…
Between July 15 and August 6, 2026, AWS Strands Agents Tools — the first-party tool package for the Strands Agents SDK — received four distinct security advisories. The vulnerabilities range from credential disclosure to arbitrary command execution, but they share a singular root cause: security-sensitive parameters were exposed as LLM-controllable inputs in the tool schema.…
The AgentCore Harness Bypass: A Structural Vulnerability A critical vulnerability in the AWS Bedrock AgentCore harness, identified as CVE-2026-18830, has exposed a fundamental flaw in how agentic systems process tool execution requests. With a CVSS score of 8.6, this vulnerability allowed authenticated users to execute tools while bypassing essential model invocation and security controls. The…
The Shadow MCP Visibility Gap As Model Context Protocol (MCP) adoption accelerates within enterprise agentic workflows, security teams face a significant visibility challenge: shadow MCP. When developers or automated agents establish direct connections to unapproved MCP servers, they bypass centralized security controls, creating blind spots in the infrastructure. This uncontrolled traffic flow complicates auditability and…