Nova Labs, the parent company behind Helium Blockchain, agreed to pay the United States Stock Exchange and Securities Commission (SEC) $ 200,000 to resolve the charges of civil values fraud that the regulator presented against the company in January, said a judicial presentation on Thursday.
Without admitting or denying any crime, Nova Labs agreed to pay the fine to resolve accusations that it cheated institutional investors during a financing round from the late 2021 to the beginning of 2022, during which he raised $ 200 million in fresh capital with an assessment of $ 1 billion. In his complaint, the SEC accused Nova Labs to lie to possible investors about several renowned business clients, including Nestlé, Salesforce and Lime, said they were using Helium technology.
The SEC accused Nova labs of repeatedly exaggerating the nature of their relations with these three corporations to ensure investments, promoting them as customers and “users” of their technology. According to the complaint, the real contact of Nova Labs with Lime, Salesforce and Nestlé was limited and occurred mainly before the launch of the helium network in mid -2019.
For example, according to the SEC, the scope of Nestlé’s relationship with Nova Labs was a small -scale test of some of the company’s hardware components in its water delivery business in 2018, before Nova Labs was even in the cryptographic business. His relationship with Scooter Company Lime was limited to two demonstrations in person from the Nova Labs component hardware with an audience of only two Lime employees, at least one of whom left the company shortly after, at the beginning of 2019, said the SEC.
Both Nestlé and Lime finally sent orders of cessation and withdrawal of Nova’s laboratories, according to the SEC, threatening the company with legal actions if it continued to use its trademarks and claiming to have a continuous relationship with them, the complaint alleged.
As part of the Nova Labs liquidation agreement with the SEC, the regulator agreed to withdraw another two claims that the company violated federal values, even through the sale of three of its tokens, the token of the helium network (HNT), the token of the Helium (mobile) mobile network and the token of the IoT helium network (IoT), which the sec declared in January in January in January settlement agreement. These statements were withdrawn with prejudice, which means that the SEC is forbidden to present a future case under the same accusations.
Nova Labs held the agreement in a blog post on Thursday, qualifying it as “Great Victoria for Helium and the People’s Network.”
“With this dismissal, we can now definitely say that all the critical points of Helio compatible and the distribution of HNT, IoT and mobile tokens through the helium network are not values,” said the blog post. “The result states that selling hardware and distributing tokens for network growth does not automatically convert them into values in the eyes of the SEC.”
The blog post did not mention the $ 200,000 agreement or the statement that Nova Labs cheated investors.
When she contacted to comment, the legal director of the Nova Labs, Sarah Aberg, told Coindesk that, although the liquidation agreement prohibits the company from admitting or denying the statements, “we can point out that, both at the time of those statements and today, the use of data in the helium network has always been publicly available.”
The agreement of agreement, presented in the South District of New York (SDNY) on Thursday, is subject to the approval of a federal judge.
