Ripple v. SEC case update as of October 6, 2023

As the cryptocurrency market is waiting for the official closure of the legal battle between the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Ripple, those close to the case have weighed in on the latest court decision denying the regulator’s request for an early appeal.

Specifically, lawyer Bill Morgan argued that the SEC had “lost big” and kept making its job more difficult for itself in other cases, especially against cryptocurrency businesses, by insisting that XRP was a security, in a series of X posts shared on October 4.

SEC’s losing battle

As Morgan explained:

“The SEC lost big. It lost on all three elements it neded to satisfy the test for certification for an interlocutory appeal,” as “the court found 1. there was no controlling question of the law; 2. there was no substantial ground for differences of opinion (…); 3. an interlocutory appeal would not materially advance the ultimate termination of a complete loss by the SEC on every element. Totally smashed.” 

According to him, “the SEC certainly is helping to entrench [Judge] Torres’ decision as a precedent for the argument there can be different categories of sales and different classes of the reasonable buyer (institutional buyers v retail buyers through programmatic sales) with different expectations.”

As the legal expert added:

“That could make the SEC’s job and evidentiary burden harder in other cases, especially against crypto exchanges. They stuffed up. But you just keep pushing it Gary Gensler and let’s see where it ends.”

That said, Morgan also pointed out that the SEC had managed to achieve one thing – “inculcate in probably millions of people in the US and globally in crypto a deep lifelong mistrust and antipathy towards it and belief, rightly or wrongly, it has some corruption. That is some effort.”

At the same time, regulatory affairs and complex litigation expert and Ripple’s chief legal officer Stuart Alderoty stressed that “the Court’s July 13 ruling [that retail sales of XRP were not securities sales] was, and remains, the law of the land. XRP is not a security.”

Meanwhile, the XRP token, which has been the focus of the prolonged court standoff, was at press time changing hands at the price of $0.52, down 0.64% on the day but recording a 2.52% gain across the previous week and a 3.85 % increase in the last 30 days, as per the latest data retrieved by Finbold on October 6.

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