In brief
- The SEC will share its emails and internal documents related to Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP by mid-August.
- Ripple won that motion in April and wanted the files by June 18. The SEC said it’s too much work.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) wants a New York Court to give it two more months to disclose emails and internal documents on Bitcoin, Ethereum and XRP.
“Making careful, good-faith determinations of applicable privileges, as is required in these circumstances, is a sensitive, time-consuming endeavor,” the SEC wrote in a letter to the court on Friday.
The SEC has alleged, since December, that payments company Ripple has raised over $1.3 billion in ongoing unregistered securities sales of its native currency, XRP. Ripple denies the allegations.
On March 15, Ripple asked Judge Sarah Netburn to order the SEC to hand over its communications about crypto. Ripple’s lawyers think that the SEC could be prejudiced against crypto; proof of prejudice could help Ripple win the case, claim the lawyers.
On April 6, Judge Netburn granted Ripple’s requests “in large part,” denying its request to access the SEC’s staff emails about XRP’s legal status.
Ripple Wins Ruling to Expose SEC Docs on Bitcoin, Ethereum
Since December, Ripple Labs has been fighting a $1.3 billion case brought against it by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which accuses the digital payments company of offering an unregistered security in the form of its native XRP token. The company today won a discovery ruling that will require the SEC to hand over internal documents about Bitcoin and Ethereum. As a result, the general public may soon get a peek behind the curtain of the SEC, which has been historically tight-li...
On June 4, Ripple asked the court to order the SEC to give a deadline of June 18. Scraping through all the data takes time, the SEC responded in its June 11 filing. The agency called the June 18 deadline “one-sided.”
The SEC said the agency has already collected 25,000 emails and is still reviewing “tens of thousands” of internal documents. But it has to speak with its former employees to make sense of some of the old documents, it said.
Ripple’s lawyers want the information by June 18. It accused the SEC of purposefully delaying the production of documents “as a reason for extending the [discovery] schedule.”
XRP Is Worth More Today Than Before SEC Lawsuit Against Ripple
Usually, legal troubles are bad news for stock prices and crypto assets. XRP, the native asset of the Ripple payments platform, is proving to be an exception. After rising over 5% in the last day, the price of an XRP token is now $0.60, and the market cap is $27.9 billion, according to data from Nomics. That's higher than where the price was before the SEC filed a $1.3 billion lawsuit against Ripple Labs. On December 18, 2020, four days before the suit, XRP was worth $0.58 with a market cap unde...
“For almost a decade, the SEC watched as XRP grew and developed, all the while issuing no formal guidance that its sales may be illegal,” counsel from Ripple wrote in the March 15 filing to US District Court Judge Sarah Netburn.
“The SEC did, however, announce that sales of two similar digital assets—bitcoin and ether—were not securities offerings.” But the SEC has never disclosed its internal reasoning. We will soon find out.
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