Ripple v. SEC case update as of September 25, 2023

With the cryptocurrency community still at the edge of its seat, waiting for the official end of the prolonged legal battle between Ripple and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), popular commentators on the case have shared more insights.

As it happens, one of them is legal expert Bill Morgan, who recently highlighted the fact that XRP was now the only digital asset with legal clarity in the US – not Bitcoin (BTC) or Ethereum (ETH), as he explained in an X post published on September 24.

Specifically, he said:

“It is well understood by the XRP community that a speech that the SEC itself disowned as reflecting its official position cannot give Bitcoin and Ethereum the legal clarity of a court decision XRP now enjoys. Good that others are starting to realize that fact.”

‘Speeches are not law’

Indeed, Morgan was referring to the video shared by X users Digital Asset Investor.XRP and RIZ.XRP, in which Joseph Grundfest, a legal scholar and a prominent expert on capital markets, corporate governance, and securities litigation, argued that:

“Speeches do not have the force of law, whether the speeches by presidents or by division directors of the SEC. Decisions as to whether Bitcoin and Ether are or are not securities are, as a practical matter, are going to be made by the federal courts if and when the appropriate litigation actually arises.”

As Grundfest further stressed, “the logic in the speech may be persuasive, or it may not be persuasive, but still, it’s just a speech,” adding that logic will probably require articulation in a brief filed with the court, “but it will have no precedential effect. Again, unless the SEC takes formal rule-making action, speeches and other pronouncements by the SEC do not have the force of law.”

“Second, and perhaps most intriguing, Division Director Hinman’s analysis depends upon his understanding of the state of facts regarding Bitcoin and Ether as of June 2018. What was his understanding of the state of facts? We don’t know. Nothing in the speech has the Division Director explain what it is about Bitcoin or Ether that leads him to the conclusion that it’s sufficiently decentralized.”

Meanwhile, the XRP token that is at the center of this legal drama was at press time changing hands at the price of $0.496199, recording a decline of 2.35% on the day, increasing 0.78% across the previous week while losing 4.82% to its value in the past month, according to the data on September 25.

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