Seedrs has already announced its intention to launch in the United States, following the SEC's approval of JOBS Act Title III rules last Friday. Private Equity Wire reported that the London-based equity crowdfunding platform will commence a beta test of its crowdfunding platform 'within weeks', with a view to an official launch early in 2016.

It's Halloween weekend, when dark forces walk abroad, demanding candy. But crowdfunding investors in the UK and USA are waiting to see what their regulators will do.

Have the crowdfunders upset somebody? It seems we might have. The Times, traditionally England's newspaper of record, published an article headlined "Crowdfunding is a 'scandal waiting to happen'" and illustrated it with a large picture of Zopa founder Giles Andrews. 

Zopa is the UK's oldest peer-to-peer lender, and this week its cumulative lending passed the one billion mark. 

Equity crowdfunding is a new trend, an alternative or a complement to angel investing and venture capital (VC). Advocates of crowd equity talk about bringing new money to the table and the opportunities for ordinary investors who aren't high net worth individuals (HNWIs) or what the regulators call "sophisticated" investors. There's an active debate about how equity crowdfunding fits in and how it might change the playing field.

Not mythical, rare, or particularly valuable
(Source:Tumblr)

Awareness of peer-to-peer (P2P) lending is increasing, but people don't fully understand how it works, and aren't aware they could lose money, or have to pay tax on their earnings, according to a survey funded by the Yorkshire Building Society.

There is some feeling in the crowdfunding industry that the survey is a piece of scaremongering. After all, banks and building societies currently offer savings products with yields at or close to historic lows. The survey focuses on awareness of security - an area where deposit-type savings accounts benefit from the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. Let's examine the survey.

Yorkshire Building Society comissioned research through YouGov in January to test the public's awareness of peer to peer lending. Out of a random sample of 1,541 UK adults, 42 per cent said YES, they had heard of this new financial service. But when tested on how much they knew about it, the poll revealed that relatively few fully understood the detail of how P2P lending actually works.