Ripple Labs achieves an important victory before the SEC and everything indicates that it will win the current dispute. Why is it so important for the cryptocurrency market?
The war is not over yet, but Ripple won an important battle:
Ripple Labs achieved a victory against the SEC last Wednesday: Judge Analisa Torres ordered that the body delivered to the company the documents of Richard Hinman’s 2018 speech. This person was the director of the SEC’s Division of Corporate Finance back then.
Said speech is a key piece in this case since in the Hinman he mentioned that Bitcoin and ETH were not securities. It is important to recall that the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple Labs is based on the fact that Ripple’s XRP token sales violated United States securities laws.
The company sees Hinman’s speech as critical to winning the lawsuit. However, we still have to wait for the ruling where the judicial body determines whether or not Ripple is a security. Specifically, those documents refer to a speech by Hinman at the Yahoo Finance All Markets Summit in June 2018.
It is also worth noting that the SEC had already objected to this decision and delayed this ruling several times. Which was considered by different voices as judicial tricks.
For now, the SEC considers that only Bitcoin is not a security (ICOs have a lot to do with those definitions). Some relevant comments in this regard are those of Michael J. Saylor, who agrees with the SEC. For his part, the founder of Cardano, Charles Hoskinson, believes that ADA is not a security and that they are even more decentralized than Bitcoin.
Why is this decision so important for cryptocurrencies?
If XRP is listed as a security, Ripple Labs will be in violation of US securities laws. Furthermore, it will pave the way for many other cryptocurrencies to suffer the same fate. The SEC could also impose heavy regulations and even censorship on major cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Cardano.
For all these reasons, the result of this dispute will strongly affect the fate of many cryptocurrencies.
Let us remember that one of the current fears is precisely a possible censorship and draconian regulation of the Ethereum network. This fear arose after The Merge update, since most of the validators are now in the US, which would give the SEC the possibility of regulating this network even in the field of protocols, as several experts claim.
The SEC has also been blamed for the current big cryptocurrency market crash. Therefore, this victory, although small, is optimistic for the entire crypto market.
On the other hand, big influencers in the cryptocurrency community, like FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, believe that regulatory clarity will help institutional investors access the cryptocurrency market.
This is how the price of Ripple reacted
Ripple’s price reaction was quite positive as its price rose above the $0.5 resistance. Although it was later corrected and is now trading at 0.48 USD. A very good recovery, although Ripple’s all-time high is at $3.84.
The cryptocurrency market has also turned bullish today. Bitcoin has regained the $20,000 level again, while ETH is trading at $1,365. However, the winner in the TOP 10 of the largest cryptocurrencies in capitalization is XRP, with an increase of 11% in the last hours.
The next step that XRP needs to take to start the recovery path is to break the resistance of $0.56 and then that of $0.59. The ultimate victory in this feud is likely to propel it to such levels, although other regulations and government measures continue to lurk, as do interest rate hikes.
By Audy Castaneda
