An American court decided, quite sensationally, to agree with the SEC , which in early August had requested to receive communications between the crypto company Ripple and their employees on the famous Slack communications social network .
Slack communications from Ripple to the SEC at a cost of $ 1 million
This is about a million Slack conversations that have taken place between Ripple and its employees.
Ripple said the production of these communications would cost up to $ 1 million . But Judge Sarah Netburn considered the texts to be an important and unique piece of evidence. the judge noted that he believes this additional information is important in the lawsuit, and thus the SEC motion was upheld.
Furthermore, the judge argued that Ripple’s cost was very disproportionate to the importance of these new documents in the pending case.
This decision is part of the lawsuit the SEC filed in December last year against the crypto company, accused of raising over $ 1.3 billion through an unregistered offering of digital assets securities.
The long legal battle between the Sec and Ripple
The story of the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple , co-founder Christian Larsen and CEO Bradley Garlinghouse , is a lawsuit the company itself has described as a possible blow to the heart of the entire cryptocurrency industry.
The accusation that the SEC makes against Ripple concerns not only the fact that unregulated securities have been sold, because it considers the company a security and therefore should act as such, but the aim could be to undermine the very credibility of the one that currently it is the third largest cryptocurrency by capitalization, after Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Unlike Bitcoin and Ethereum , which are coined slowly over time, XRP does not depend on miners to create and distribute its tokens. Instead, Ripple’s founders created the entire supply of XRP, 100 billion of them, in one fell swoop. And this would be one of the key arguments used by the sec to demonstrate that it cannot be defined as decentralized like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
A cause that could have serious repercussions on the crypto world
According to many observers, this lawsuit between the SEC and Ripple could represent a possible sword of Damocles for the whole crypto world and for its future regulation.
A defeat of Ripple in court could open dozens of lawsuits by not only the Sec but also by investors against similar companies, generating a domino effect that is difficult to predict . Suffice it to say that in December the Ripple stock, after the news of the lawsuit opened by the Sec, lost 23% of its value.
” It has been more than a decade since this new asset class was published and we have yet to start focusing on creating regulations aimed at it, ” said Carol Goforth, a professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law who studies cryptocurrency and explains very well how this fact can represent a watershed for the whole world of cryptocurrencies and the delicate question of its regulation.
