Fox Business Senior Correspondent Charles Gasparino has raised the possibility that the favorable ruling received by Ripple from Judge Analisa Torres against the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) might not withstand higher judicial review. This speculation comes in the wake of a divergent decision in the Coinbase vs. SEC lawsuit, where the SEC secured a pivotal victory, challenging the notion that digital assets can skirt securities laws—a decision that may have far-reaching consequences for the crypto industry at large.
Ripple Ruling To Be Overturned?
Gasparino, utilizing his reach on X (formerly Twitter), has spotlighted what appears to be a growing skepticism among federal judges towards Judge Torres’ ruling in favor of Ripple. Specifically, he pointed out that “A reminder to the XRP community: So far TWO Fed judges including the one considered the ‘dean’ of corporate-law judiciary (Rakoff) have scoffed at arguments using Judge Torres’ Ripple ruling as precedent because the ruling itself is so incoherent.”
He added that “no one can guarantee the ruling gets thrown out and XRP being declared an unregistered security, but the signs are there that her legal analysis is faulty.”
This skepticism was echoed in the legal community following Judge Katherine Polk Failla’s decision in the Coinbase vs. SEC case. He claimed that “securities lawyers” say the judge’s ruling against Coinbase “should be a warning to XRP holders that Judge Torres’s Ripple analysis is likely to be reversed by the federal courts.”
Failla’s ruling emphasized that “The ‘crypto’ nomenclature may be of recent vintage, but the challenged transactions fall comfortably within the framework that courts have used to identify securities for nearly eighty years,” effectively dismissing the application of Torres’ Ripple ruling as a defense.
Gasparino highlighted the Judge in the Coinbase case a rejected Coinbase’s contention that Torres’s Ripple ruling supports its case to dismiss. Instead, Judge Failla cited the Rakoff analysis on Terraform, which also rejected the Torres analysis.
This perspective gains further weight considering SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s hardline stance on cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum (ETH), suggesting a determined regulatory push that could see Torres’ ruling challenged. “If Gary Gensler considers ETH a security, the SEC will stop at nothing in getting Torres’s weird half-baked Ripple ruling overturned in the appellate division, and he has a good shot doing so,” Gasparino remarked.
XRP Community Responds
The discourse has not gone without rebuttal from the XRP community. Jesse Hynes, a lawyer and staunch XRP supporter, criticized the narrative being drawn from the Coinbase ruling, stating, “This is a really bad take lol. No real lawyer will take the decision on what was essentially a motion to dismiss and apply it to a SJ decision. The haters need to come up with better content.” This highlights a sentiment within the pro-XRP camp that the legal nuances of the case are being oversimplified or misunderstood.
Bill Morgan, another pro-XRP lawyer, directly challenged Gasparino’s interpretations, asking for explicit references that would support the claims of judicial skepticism towards Judge Torres’ decision: “To assist your readers, please point out the references in any decision of these two judges in which they ‘scoff’ at arguments based on the decision in SEC v Ripple. You are surely not talking about two motions to dismiss given the nature of such motions compared to a summary judgment decision.”
At press time, XRP traded at $0.61234.
Featured image from Shutterstock, chart from TradingView.com
