Dec 2 (Reuters) – It’s hardly a secret that the crypto industry is counting on the incoming Trump administration to end the Biden administration’s campaign of regulatory enforcement actions. And who knows? Perhaps a more crypto-friendly president will work with Congress to develop laws and regulations to guide the industry’s growth.But in the meantime, federal judges continue to view some segments of the industry with skepticism. The latest example is a Nov. 18 ruling from U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria of San Francisco, who found not only that a decentralized crypto collective could be liable for selling unregistered securities but also that a high-powered trio of venture capital funds must face investors’ claims because they were partners in the crypto collective.

Chhabria’s ruling, as Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz pointed out in client alert over the weekend, has exacerbated the liability risk for tokenholders in these decentralized autonomous organization, or DAOs, which have been touted as a way to distribute authority to a broad base of users but have been criticized by courts — including Chhabria in the Nov. 18 decision — as a device to evade U.S. regulation.

Chhabria took a dim view of all of the defendants’ arguments, as you would expect from an opinion that opened with the judge’s observation that the case raised “several new and important questions about the ability of people in the crypto world to inoculate themselves from liability by creating novel legal arrangements to profit from exotic financial instruments.”