SEC Revises $22 Million Fine for LBRY to $111,000

The regulator revised the civil penalty after determining that the LBRY blockchain will not be able to pay the initial amount imposed.

The U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) acknowledged LBRY’s inability to pay a larger fine in a May 12 court filing.

In the filing made in a New Hampshire District Court, the SEC sought to amend the initial $22 million financial penalty imposed on blockchain-based file sharing platform LBRY. The SEC had previously argued that LBRY should pay a Tier 2 or Tier 3 penalty for continuing to offer its LBC tokens for 10 months after the charges laid out in an enforcement action.

“That said, because of the need to balance the deterrence from a penalty with LBRY’s inability to pay, the Commission requests a penalty at the upper limit of a Tier 1 statutory penalty.1 The Commission thus asks the Court to impose a penalty of $111,614,” said the regulator in the filing.

A verdict was delivered for the lawsuit in November, which like most of the regulator’s recent actions, alleged that LBRY had conducted an unregistered securities offering and failed to register with the agency.

The LBRY token was the blockchain’s native token used primarily to credit publishers when consumers of their content generate revenue. At the time of the ruling, the team behind LBRY noted that it set “an extraordinarily dangerous precedent” for other blockchains in the regulator’s crosshairs who had not conducted an Initial Coin Offering (ICO).

Shortly after the verdict was made public, the LBRY team announced that the company behind the blockchain had been “killed by legal and SEC debts,” meaning that the regulator’s penalty revision is hardly a win for decentralized currencies.

At the time of writing, the LBRY token was trading at $0.0102, up 3% in the last 24 hours.