Nova Labs, the parent company behind the helium blockchain, agreed to pay $ 200,000 to the Securities and Exchange commission) to settle the civilian securities fraud against the cabinet in January, a legal file announced on Thursday.
Without admitting or denying any reprehensible act, Nova Labs agreed to pay the fine to settle the accusations that he misleaded institutional investors during a financing cycle of the end of 2021 at the beginning of 2022, during which he raised $ 200 million in fresh capital to an evaluation of $ 1 billion. In its complaint, the SEC accused Nova Labs of lying to potential investors about a number of renowned customers – notably Nestlé, Salesforce and Lime – he said that helium technology.
The SEC has accused Nova Labs of repeatedly exaggerating the nature of its relations with these three companies in order to guarantee investments, to boast them as customers and “users” of its technology. According to the complaint, the real contact of Nova Labs with Lime, Salesforce and Nestlé was limited and occurred before the launch of the helium network in mid-2019.
For example, according to the SEC, the extent of Nestlé’s relationship with Nova Labs was a small -scale test of certain components of the company in its water delivery activity in 2018, before Nova Labs was even in the cryptography sector. His relationship with the SCOOT LIME company was limited to two events in person of the equipment of Nova Labs components to an audience of two Lime employees – one of which left the company shortly after – at the beginning of 2019, said the SEC.
Nestlé and Lime finally sent orders to stop stopping and Dessists of Nova Labs, according to the dry, threatening the company with legal proceedings if it continued to use their marks and otherwise claiming to have a continuous relationship with them, according to the complaint.
Within the framework of the Nova Labs settlement agreement with the SEC, the regulator agreed to delete two other affirmations according to which the company violated the federal laws on securities, including thanks to the sale of three of its tokens – the Helium Network (HNT) token, the Helium Mobile Network token (Mobile) and the Helium Network Token (IoT) – Affected in January in January in January to be Securities, according to the settlement agreement. These complaints have been abandoned with prejudices, which means that the dry is prohibited to carry a future case under the same allegations.
Nova Labs celebrated the rules in a blog post on Thursday, calling for this a “major victory for helium and the popular network”.
“With this dismissal, we can now definitively say that all compatible helium hot spots and the distribution of HNT, IoT and mobile tokens via the helium network are not titles,” said the blog post. “The result establishes that the sale of equipment and the distribution of tokens for the growth of the network does not automatically make them securities in the eyes of the dry.”
The blog post made no mention of the $ 200,000 regulations or the complaint that Nova laboratories were misleading investors.
When he was contacted to comment, Sarah Aberg -in -chief of Nova Labs, told Coindesk that if the settlement agreement prohibits the company from admitting or denying the affirmations: “We can emphasize that at the time of these declarations and today, the use of data on the helium network has always been accessible to the public.”
The settlement agreement, filed Thursday in the South District of New York (SDNY), is subject to the approval of a federal judge.
