SEC v Ripple: a watershed moment?

On 22nd December 2020, the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US announced that it was taking action against Ripple regarding the company's alleged unauthorised sale of $1.3billion of XRP tokens as unregistered securities. This action rocked the entire cryptocurrency sector although, interestingly, not the XRP price (which on 22/12/2022 stood at $0.51 and is currently at $0.74). If we then fast forward to 13th June 2023, Judge Torres made judgement in the SEC v Ripple case resulting in publications such as CNBC’s, to state, “XRP coin surges after judge delivers a huge win to Ripple in SEC case.” As XRP’s price rose from $0.47 to (at one stage) almost $0.82, it seemed that the market thought that, indeed, Ripple was a clear winner.

Tweet from Ripple’s chief legal officer

Source: Twitter

The judgement encouraged Coinbase, Kraken and Gemini to relist XRP which, in turn, led to a spike in the turnover of over $6billion in 24hrs in the cryptocurrency, an increase of 1351% from the …