«Initial Coin Offering» ed il mercato delle cripto-attività: l’ambiguità degli «utility token»

The present study aims at framing the technical performance of the «Initial Coin Offering» in the wider context of the crypto-assets market, considering the possibility of reducing the complex dynamics concerning the phenomenon in the context of pre-existing legal categories or, alternatively, exploring the opportunity of an ad hoc regulation, adept at fully incorporating technical and legal challenges. Moreover, this study plans to investigate and question about the nature of hybrid «utility tokens», as these, most of all, create doubts about their legal qualification, due to their complex functional structure. Indeed, these tokens, besides the right to enjoy a good or a service, can also offer returns of financial nature, which put them in an area bordering the different survey sets: if on the one hand they are close to the empirical and more immediate set, which leads them back to their “consumeristic” area of belonging, on the other, there is the one which aims at verifying the prevalence of a concrete function of such crypto-assets. Herein, the study tries to analyze the perspective outlined by the second approach in the current legal framework, necessarily influenced by the passage of the UE Proposal for a Regulation on Markets in Crypto-assets.