The court has given the United States Securities and Exchange Commission until September 3 to respond to Ripple’s suit to compel the authority to divulge data on its employees’ XRP holdings. As part of its ongoing legal battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ripple has filed a motion to compel the SEC to divulge its internal cryptocurrency trading policies.
James Filan, an attorney who has been closely monitoring the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple, has revealed a new motion document that seeks to clarify if the SEC allowed its staff to trade XRP, which, according to the regulator, is unregistered security. The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York compels the SEC to produce data on its trading policies for governing digital assets.
Defendants also want certificates on SEC employees’ XRP holdings, either with personal information deleted or aggregated.
Fair notice defense
Defendants emphasized that previous attempts to obtain information from the SEC had failed. We met and discussed with the SEC on this subject on July 8, July 15, August 18, and August 25, with no progress, according to the motion.
According to Filan, the court has given the SEC until September 3 to respond to the present motion. Ripple’s recent legal attempts come as the community prepares for a virtual meeting with the SEC to address the firm’s planned move to force the regulator to deliver a package of documents that defendants think are crucial to their “fair notice” defense. The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York’s Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn has scheduled an online meeting for August 31.
As previously reported, the SEC filed a massive lawsuit against Ripple in December 2020, alleging that XRP was unregistered security offering worth $1.3 billion. Last month, Judge Netburn ruled in favor of Ripple Labs, approving the deposition of William Hinman, former director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Corporation Finance. The SEC official is well-known for his 2018 speech in which he said Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market value, was not a security.
1 million Slack messages
Ripple now compels to send to the SEC gigabytes of Slack messages that were previously withheld owing to an apparent data error. US Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn has ordered Ripple to provide over one million missing Slack communications between employees, as demanded by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Despite Ripple’s protests that complying would cost up to $1 million, the judge judged the messages to be crucial and unique evidence in the SEC’s ongoing action against selling unregistered securities. On December 20, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Ripple Labs and its initial and current CEOs, Christian Larsen and Bradley Garlinghouse, for selling XRP as an unregistered security.
According to Law360, the SEC said in its original motion to compel Ripple the messages between Ripple workers were relevant to the parties’ claims and defenses and proportional to the needs of the case.
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