Ethereum Does not meet the First prong #6
Description
The U.S. Supreme Court's Howey case and subsequent case law have found that an "investment contract" exists when there is the investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others.
Quoted from SEC's own website - https://www.sec.gov/corpfin/framework-investment-contract-analysis-digital-assets
According to this definition of "investment contract" ETH's staking is not even a investment contract much less passing Howey test, let me explain why
Courtesy - Ben Eddington Eth2Book
This depicts how eth staking works, so in a nutshell ethereum's "Deposit Contract"(where 32 eth must be sent to become a validator) is just a bridge between its execution layer and consensus layer. Notable thing is the user depositing in the Deposit Contract still hold Full self custody of funds now he just holds them in consensus layer from which he can teleport back to execution layer.
There is no involvement from any "Enterprise" in this whole flow, not even the "notorious Ethereum foundation" can do anything about it :). The deposit contract is not owned by anyone and no funds can be withdrawn from it. Some more points on deposit contract which prove its not a Investment Contract last two points are critical to note https://eth2book.info/capella/part2/deposits-withdrawals/contract/
Coinbase in this article correctly says staking is not an investment contract but i guess they skipped the technical details knowingly to not make the article too hard to read
https://www.coinbase.com/blog/coinbases-staking-services-are-not-securities-and-heres-why
(Also I dont know which blockchain's staking they are referring to)
So all in all Eth staking is designed to be fully self - custodial . So according to definition on SEC's website ETH does not meet the "1. An investment of money:" prong either. If that prong itself is not met there is no point for further prongs of Howey test to be even verified imo.
Also I am not familiar with any possible discrepancies between actual U.S law and SEC's definition of investment contract. But i guess it wont matter just the fact that ETH Deposit contract is not a "Investment Contract" according to their website's definition is enough a claim to prove how wrong SEC is in courts.
Here's the Deposit contract Address on mainnet - 0x00000000219ab540356cBB839Cbe05303d7705Fa
Where it can be easily verified that its not owned by anyone and is permissionless.
You also might want to contact some OG devs like Ben Edington to seek further clarification as this is strictly according to my best knowledge.
Thanks for building the website.