Crowdfunding and the Public/Private Divide in U.S. Securities Regulation

The origination and expansion of crowdfunding as a capital-raising tool has been a hot topic on the street and in the media and the academy for a few years now. In less than ten years, this fusion of social media and traditional corporate finance—a mode of corporate finance through which firms raise investment capital by reaching out over the Internet to a broad, undifferentiated mass of potential investors —grew from a creative impulse to a movement that catalyzed federal legislative action. Its socio-legal bounds are as yet relatively untested. It seems that crowdfunding offers something to nearly everyone.