By Jeff John Roberts. October 24, 2022. (Fortune)
Ripple provided a lively end to an otherwise sleepy week in crypto when its CEO and general counsel took to Twitter to tweak the Securities and Exchange Commission after the company obtained confidential emails the agency had fought to keep secret. The emails concern a 2018 speech in which a former senior official at the SEC declared that Ethereum was not a security on the basis of a novel legal test—a test the agency chose not to apply when it sued Ripple in late 2020.
We still don’t know the content of those emails, but the fact that the agency fought hard to conceal them suggests they contain unflattering information related to the SEC’s erratic and arbitrary behavior when it comes to the crypto industry. Ripple’s executives, who have seen the emails, used even harsher language to describe the agency, saying “the shamefulness…will shock you” and implying it has been operating in bad faith.