Tag: SEC v Ripple

Ripple Gets OK To Pause SEC Penalty As It Mulls Appeal

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By Aislinn Keely. (Law360). September 4, 2024.

Law360 (September 4, 2024, 9:34 PM EDT) — A New York federal judge on Wednesday signed off on Ripple Labs’ request to hold off on paying the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission the $125 million penalty it owes to allow time for either side to appeal the landmark ruling in the agency’s registration case.

The blockchain firm asked U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres earlier Wednesday to delay the monetary portion of her Aug. 7 judgment, which directed Ripple to pay the penalty for failing to register institutional sales of its XRP token. Though Ripple was due to pay up on Friday, Judge Torres allowed a stay until either 30 days after the time to appeal expires, or the resolution of any appeal. 

Read more at: Law360

Court Brings Gavel Down on SEC’s War on Crypto

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By Roslyn Layton. (DC Journal). August 20, 2024.

On August 8, Judge Analisa Torres of the U.S. Southern District of New York issued her judgment on the case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission against the blockchain payments company Ripple. 

In her 16-page order, Torres brought the District Court’s gavel down on the SEC’s spectacular failure to expand the administrative state beyond what the law allows. The SEC should read the room and move on.

From the moment the SEC filed its case against Ripple in December 2020, the breadth and audacity of its legal assault on the company and its two senior executives rightly dubbed it the cryptocurrency trial of the century. The SEC argued that the XRP token, a digital commodity by any definition, was a security and that all XRP sales between any two parties are investment contracts with Ripple in perpetuity.

Read the full piece here: DC Journal.

SEC Intends to Amend Complaint Against Third Party Tokens (Like SOL) in Binance Case

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By Amitoj Singh. (CoinDesk). July 30, 2024.

  • The SEC intends to amend its complaint against Binance, including with respect to the ‘Third Party Crypto Asset Securities,” it said in a court filing.
  • This likely means that the Judge won’t have to decide whether 10 tokens such as Solana and Matic are unregistered securities or not.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) may be dropping it’s charges against so-called third-party tokens, such as Solana’s SOL and Polygon’s MATIC, which have been part of its case against Binance, according to a court filing early Tuesday morning.

According to the filing, the SEC has already informed the defendants, Binance and affiliated entities (namely Binance.US and founder Changpeng Zhao), that it “intends to seek leave to amend its complaint, including with respect to the ‘Third Party Crypto Asset Securities’… “obviating the need for the Court to issue a ruling as to the sufficiency of the allegations as to those tokens at this time.”

Read full article here: CoinDesk

It’s time to end the SEC’s war on crypto

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By Anthony Scaramucci. (Blockworks). June 6, 2024.

The American government is badly damaged — we need public servants who care more about right or wrong, especially when it comes to the crypto industry.

I’m not denying that there are reasonable questions about how crypto firms should be regulated. Many policy questions still require legislation to resolve. But, our current system is broken.

The Securities and Exchange Commission traditionally does not expose itself and its credibility to an appellate beatdown. But this SEC is different. This SEC and Chair Gary Gensler have an extra-regulatory anti-crypto agenda. And they are using their power to obstruct and delay the industry — imposing their own preferences where they can. 

Gensler may not like bitcoin. But whether you decide to invest in bitcoin is up to you, not the SEC. 

Read the full article here: Blockworks

2024 Is Crypto’s Moment

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By Jerry Rogers. (RealClear Policy). May 31, 2024.

The 2024 elections are once again hinging on narrow margins nationwide with hot issues like immigration, the economy, abortion, and foreign policy getting most attention. But many of the contests, including the presidency, may ultimately be decided on other issues motivating different constituencies that can hold the balance.

One that is starting to gain more credible momentum is an unexpected entrant – the increasingly enthusiastic crypto constituency in the United States.

It isn’t a fringe industry anymore and it’s not new to politics. But crypto is getting more robust and organized in this cycle than ever before and notching serious legal and policy victories on the way. 

Leadership at crypto firms tired of endless SEC lawsuits and lack of a regulatory framework are deciding to fight back. A turning point was the legal victory of California-based Ripple Labs against the SEC in one such lawsuit.

Notching that win had Garlinghouse emerge as a spiritual leader for many in crypto’s foray into hardball politics. His defiance paved the way for other companies to fight back and win.

Read the full piece from Jerry Rogers here: RealClear Policy.

Why The Securities And Exchange Commission Lost Its War On Crypto

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By Dan Ikenson. (Forbes). May 28, 2024

From banning “non-compete” clauses to re-requiring “net-neutrality” to hyperinflating the costs of taxpayer-funded infrastructure with extravagant union giveaways, the Biden administration has overseen a massive expansion of the regulatory state. But amid this regulatory incontinence, which sows uncertainty, suppresses innovation, and retards investment and growth, there are encouraging signs that Congress, the courts, and US entrepreneurs are fed up with rule by executive fiat.

Take, for example, the escapades of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Since assuming power, Biden’s approach to cryptocurrencies and related technologies has been to delegate and defer to an activist SEC and its crusading chairman, Gary Gensler. Chairman Gensler portrays the crypto industries as “rife with hucksters, fraudsters, [and] scam artists,” which, he seems to believe, excuses him from proposing and promulgating concrete rules, in compliance with statute, for the industry to follow. Instead, Gensler sees crypto companies as undeserving of such regulatory clarity, choosing to keep them off balance through a “regulation by enforcement” approach – aggressively suing crypto companies for non-compliance with securities laws without ever articulating what “compliance” requires.

In the absence of clear, legal pathways, companies in the digital asset space have taken their innovations and expertise to friendlier shores. Governments in places such as the United Kingdom, the European Union, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates have already established regulatory frameworks and their economies are certain to reap the benefits of the resulting financial and related technological innovations.

Read the full article here: Forbes

SEC Ethics Probe Points to Bigger Problem With Federal Tort Claims Act Immunity

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By Frank Francone. (Real Clear Policy). May 20, 2024

In his thought-provoking book, Skin in the Game, Nassim Taleb argues that when decision-makers bear the consequences of their actions, they tend to make better decisions.  Unfortunately, this doesn’t apply to federal regulators. The Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), exempts them from liability for all damages they inflict on Americans by intentional and demonstrably harmful acts.

This exemption – rooted in the hoary doctrine of the “divine right of kings” – gives no recourse to average citizens, feeds a culture of broad deference to federal agencies, and allows wrongdoing by high officials to be largely ignored. For institutions already suffering from plummeting public trust, this should not continue.

Consider, for example, the long series of poor decisions by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in its attempt to regulate cryptocurrencies. For years, the SEC issued erratic, contradictory, and positively misleading guidance about the legal status of digital assets. Indeed, William Hinman, then the SEC Director of Corporation Finance, appears to have had serious conflicts of interest that may have caused him to mislead investors and fintech companies.

Read the full piece here: Real Clear Policy

The SEC Came to Destroy Crypto, Not to Regulate It

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By Roslyn Layton. (DC Journal). April 3, 2024.

Following the Securities and Exchange Commission’s effort to stretch, bend and twist the law to grant itself authority to regulate cryptocurrencies has been like watching an exhausting video game. By the last level, the monster has grown so grotesque and ridiculous that you’re just waiting for the relief of seeing it explode so the comforting words “game over” can finally appear.

Unfortunately, it’s not a game for many innovative U.S. Financial Tech companies. The SEC has mobilized all its resources to carry out a policy against crypto companies that is not designed to protect investors from fraud or even to clarify what legal compliance means. It is practicing what professor J.W. Verret of George Mason University has called “enforcement by destruction,” trying to turn courts into execution chambers for an industry it never intended to regulate but to destroy.

It comes down to a bait-and-switch strategy by two successive SEC chairmen to claim that every digital asset, no matter how it is designed, is itself a “crypto asset security,” and that gives the agency full authority to require they be registered like stocks. Nothing in nearly a century of securities law provides the SEC such all-encompassing authority over an entire asset class. But the SEC’s strategy was never to prove this theory in court so much as to have a pretext to launch enforcement actions never meant to bring anyone into compliance.

Read the full piece here: DC Journal

The SEC Is Engaging In Regulation By Destruction

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By J.W. Verret. (Law360). April 1, 2024.

The term “regulation by enforcement” was coined in 1990 by Harvey Pitt in his days as a Yale law professor, about a decade after he served as general counsel of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and before he became chair of the SEC. The warning was eerily similar to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address cautioning about the growth of the military-industrial complex.

Regulation by enforcement has become manifest in the SEC’s approach to the emerging technology of cryptocurrencies, using lawsuits instead of rulemaking to claim that all digital assets are unregistered securities and fully under the commission’s authority.

Pitt’s term doesn’t fully capture what the SEC’s strategy on crypto has evolved into: “Enforcement by destruction” is more apt.

Read the full piece here: Law360

J.W. Verret is an associate professor at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School. He is a former member of the SEC’s Investor Advisory Committee.

The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of their employer, its clients, or Portfolio Media Inc., or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.

Government’s Attack Vectors

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By Kristi Warner

The government’s approach to remedies and bitcoin mining are similar examples of agencies utilizing tools at their disposal to attack the crypto industry. 

Remedies

In July 2023, the SEC lost in the Ripple case on the main legal theories – Judge Torres ruled that secondary market sales were not sales of unregistered securities and XRP itself is not a security. 

Individual XRP holders got their resolution.

Now the case is really at a point where institutional sales and remedies are the focus. The SEC utilizes remedies and reliefs in many cases, and the type of remedies asked for typically varies based on the type of litigation. 

In the Ripple case, the SEC after losing on the legal theories, and vindicating the two executives still wants the company to pay a lot of money in remedies so they can hold the company “accountable”, and right any wrongdoing. 

The irony is that the people the SEC are supposed to be protecting (you and me) were not harmed by any of Ripple’s actions. Instead, it was the SEC’s action that resulted in restricted access, delistings and actual harm to us. 

That is because the SEC has weaponized its authority in an attempt to destroy innovation. Thankfully what we have been seeing in a lot of the cases are ourts keeping the SEC in check. 

The American Government was designed to be a system with checks and balances between the three branches. 

So while I agree we can look beyond the SEC v. Ripple case, I still think lawsuits in general are important to pay attention to as they are key to keeping the government agencies accountable and allow the industry to fight back. 

Bitcoin Mining

Another recent example of this is the RIOT Platforms and Texas Blockchain Council suit against the Biden Administration in a Texas court. 

The backstory is the U.S. Dept. of Energy had decided to conduct an “emergency” survey of the energy use by crypto miners based on its own unwarranted assertion that mining is a threat to the power grid. Allegedly the agency threatened companies with criminal fines and civil penalties if they did not answer the survey. The survey was requested without proper procedure established by law including public notice and comment requirements.

Once again we’re faced with a government agency trying to sidestep the law and bully crypto companies into submission by misusing tools at their disposal.

Solution

How can we combat that? 

In today’s world one solution to maintain the system of checks and balances is heading to Court. That’s what RIOT and Texas Blockchain did and while it was not the exact relief they were seeking, the lawsuit forced the government to halt their survey and destroy the sensitive and confidential information they had already acquired through the survey. 

Same with Ripple – they exposed government overreach by fighting back against the SEC in court. 

These are both huge blows to the government’s war on crypto because when these agencies are committing government overreach, the courts are putting that power in check and forcing them to follow the law. 

Watch the full livecast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQxoBShe2CI&t=2s