From New York magazine interview with Gary Gensler:

“Everything other than bitcoin,” Gensler told me, “you can find a website, you can find a group of entrepreneurs, they might set up their legal entities in a tax haven offshore, they might have a foundation, they might lawyer it up to try to arbitrage and make it hard jurisdictionally or so forth.” In other words, there are people behind these cryptocurrencies using a variety of complex and legally opaque mechanisms, but at the most basic level, they are trying to promote their tokens and entice investors. (Bitcoin, because of its unique history and creation story, is fundamentally different from other crypto projects in this respect.)

“They might drop their tokens overseas at first and contend or pretend that it’s going to take six months before they come back to the U.S.,” he continued. “But at the core,” he argued, “these tokens are securities because there’s a group in the middle and the public is anticipating profits based on that group.” The claim that crypto investors are hoping to profit based on the efforts of those intermediaries — in much the same way that stockholders in public companies hope to see their investments appreciate over time — is central to Gensler’s position that, as a legal matter, these are actually transactions in securities that fall within the SEC’s jurisdiction.