Ripple’s general counsel Stuart Alderoty says that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) lawsuit ruling will have a positive impact on the wider crypto industry.
In an interview on the Chain Reaction podcast, Alderoty says that the ruling Ripple determined that digital tokens being traded on crypto exchanges are not securities.
According to Ripple’s chief legal officer, the ruling could consequently be a boon for the lawsuits the SEC filed against Binance and Coinbase last month.
“The core allegation or the core claim both in the Coinbase lawsuit and in the Binance lawsuit is that an exchange trading a digital token will need to register as a national security exchange. That was repudiated by discharge in our case.
We have a clear statement that the trading of a digital token, in this case XRP which can analogize other tokens, on a digital asset exchange where the buyer doesn’t know who the seller is, the seller doesn’t know who the buyer is, does not make a contract for an investment and therefore there is no security. And therefore there’s no role for the SEC to play.
I think that ruling will play well in the Coinbase case and should play equally on that claim in the Binance case.”
On the potential outcome if the SEC appeals against the ruling that was partially a win for Ripple, Alderoty says,
“In terms of the next steps, the SEC may decide to appeal and they have signaled in the weeks since the decision in various ways that the staff will be recommending to the Commission that they file an appeal.
So I don’t think that they are very happy with the decision and the part of the decision that we’ve been talking about that the token itself is not a contract for investment, you have to look at the facts and circumstances. They are not happy about that. They will probably be taking it to appeal.
We don’t shy away from an appeal and we think the judge got that right and we think that was faithful application of the law and we think that the courts of appeal will not only affirm that but maybe even amplify that to an even greater extent.”
