US traders can now buy/sell EOS on BlockTrades

Previously, we required users to prove they weren’t US citizens or residents before we allowed them to buy EOS on our site, because we were concerned that the ICO that was done for EOS made it an unregistered security.

The lawsuit that was recently settled between the SEC (US securities regulator) and BlockOne (the creator of EOS) indicates that our concern was somewhat warranted, but it seems that the SEC decided that while the initial ERC-20 token that was distributed as part of the EOS ICO was a security, they apparently don’t consider the mainnet EOS token a security. Our best guess is that they are classifying the “real” EOS token as a utility token, similar to the way they decided that Ethereum is no longer a security.

This decision means that we can now allow US citizens and residents to buy EOS on our site. And this is good news for our non-US customers as well, because they won’t need to provide KYC info to prove they aren’t US citizens.

On a related note, our EOS wallet was under maintenance following the EOS hardfork for quite a while. This was due to challenges associated with replaying the blockchain from scratch to adjust for the new hardfork rules. We've finally got our EOS node operational again, and we've also built new infrastructure to take snapshots of the node's database to reduce the chance that we'll experience downtimes of this extended duration in the future.