FAQ Legal Questions

The perhaps disappointing answer to many of these questions is: it depends. Many variables come into play when using DeFi. What is your legal and/or financial jurisdiction ? Are you a citizen of the United States ? if so which state ? etc.

Thus this list of guidelines is more indicative than anything else, and should help you find the proper legal council to verify that you are acting in a lawful manner when using DeFi. Nothing in this documentation should be misconstrued as legal advice, and its authors are not legal advisors in any legal or financial jurisdiction.

Please beware of self-proclaimed DeFi legal experts and pundits which you may find on social media or in our social channels. We encourage you to only listen to legal advisors of the appropriate jurisdictions.

What is the protocol's financial jurisdiction ?

Honey Finance operates in a decentralised manner. Smart contracts (programs) which allow for the protocol's transactions to occur run on a blockchain completely independently from the builders who created them. As these smart contracts (programs) reside on a blockchain, they can be accessed by anybody in the world without any force being able to intervene. We thus encourage users to make sure that they are indeed capable of using the platform in a lawful manner.

Honey Development Association (which houses the builders and contributors of the protocol) is based in Geneva Switzerland and abides by Swiss and International laws. It is not a financial entity or bank, its role is simply to write code on behalf of the DAO and to grow the DAO.

Is it legal to own bees in the United Sates ?

While we will let US attorneys answer that question, there are a few points we'd like to remind everyone. NFTs only yield $HONEY tokens if and when they are staked. An unstaked Honey NFTs is simply metadata that points to a JPEG.

Whether the potential yield is part of the intrinsic value of that NFT is up to regulators to decide, however any NFT can receive any kind of yield, as long as someone funds a farm which can emit tokens to a collection.

Securities are not illegal, but trading unregulated securities is. So bear this in mind when selling and trading NFTs (in general).

Am I allowed to use the protocol in the United States ?

While the NFT staking platform is available to US residents, the lending and borrowing protocol is not.

This is not motivated by any particulars laws that we know of, but is instead a forward looking decision on behalf of the team, who feels that the regulatory environment in the United States carries an antagonistic view on DeFi, which we want no part of.

US residents are warned of this when entering the app, however they are not geoblocked. As these programs can be interacted with on the blockchain, and consists of open source code which can be run by anyone, the app.honey.finance front end is just one of many access points for people can decide to use for engaging with the protocol. What matters is not that you visit our website, but that you engage and transact with the programs.

Many DeFi protocols are in fact prohibited to US residents, such as Serum, Yearn and others.

To learn more about the SEC's view on DeFi, we recommend further reading.

[This document is currently a draft, made public while pending legal review. At this moment, none of it consists of Honey's official stance on the subject.]