A Good Day In Court For Ripple Labs In Their Ongoing SEC Case

Ripple Labs landed a big punch against the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) case after the judge made a ruling that many in the crypto community are calling a “very big win for Ripple”.

The SEC filed a suit against Ripple in 2020 and its executives: Brad Garlinghouse and Christian Larsen. The suit was filed because the SEC believed that Ripple was selling unregistered securities.

The judge, Sarah Netburn, denied the SEC’s request to consider shielding documents related to a speech made by the SEC in June 2018. The speech was made by the then-director William Hinman. Hinman said in his speech that Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) are not securities.

Previously, the SEC had no problem with what was said in the speech as they believed that it only reflected Hinman’s personal views and not the actual policies of the SEC. The SEC thus did not object to the documents falling outside deliberative process privilege (DPP) protection.

The DPP exempts some documents in a case from being disclosed by the government in order for it to confidentially review existing policy based on what is said in the documents.

After this, the SEC backtracked and changed their argument by saying that the speech reflected Ripple’s policies and not Hinman’s personal views.

Judge Netburn responded to this by saying “The SEC seeks to have it both ways, but the speech was either intended to reflect agency policy or it was not.”

Judge Netburn’s decision to reconsider is a big win for crypto as the findings, in this case, could spell out the future for SEC filings against crypto companies.