Desperate Times: Ripple Attempt to Drag Ether into the SEC's Cloud Once Again

By: Mark Jessy

January 30, 2021 8:01 AM

The XRP defense team is in a desperate situation amid U.S Security Exchange Commission (SEC) silence on lawsuit against Ripple labs for selling "unregistered securities."

Ripples defense team demands to know why Ether isn't declared as a security, they filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the SEC. The document which targets SEC communication to co-founders of Ethereum. If XRP is eventually deemed a security, its threatening to have major negative effects ripple through the industry.

Ripple, as it has many times before, argued that XRP is not a security i.e. an investment in Ripple and is therefore not in the SEC's jurisdiction. Moreover, Ripple is prepared to drag the rest of the industry into its fight to make its case.

A representative from Ripple told Cointelegraph

"The SEC has clearly picked two winners and ignored a growing and robust industry that is much larger than Bitcoin and Ether. In addition to discovery we will seek directly in the lawsuit, we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for more information about how the SEC determined the status of Ether as a non-security."

The request is likely to entail a huge volume of records from several years of commission documents, given how long it took the commission to come forward with any statements at all.

The FOIA request will bring Ether status back into question. However, in the case of Ethereum Ether is decentralized that qualifies it as a commodity which makes ETH trading in the U.S. is under the jurisdiction of Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Since the SEC's announcement on December 2020, the price of XRP has collapsed and many U.S. based exchanges have delisted the token already, if this continue to linger on the XRP price might continue to plummet as traders will exit positions.