Ripple v. SEC case referred to judge who ordered Hinman docs release

After the favorable outcome of the protracted and widely publicized legal standoff between the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and blockchain company Ripple, US District Judge Analisa Torres has referred the case to Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn.

Indeed, Judge Netburn will take over the case for the purposes of general pretrial, which includes scheduling, discovery, non-dispositive pre-trial motions, and settlement, according to the document shared by Fox Business journalist Eleanor Terrett on July 17.

Interestingly, Netburn is the judge who had earlier decided that the controversial Hinman documents were not under the protection of deliberative process privilege, referring to the emails and drafts of the speech that a former SEC Division Director delivered at a 2018 summit claiming that Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) were not securities.

Moreover, this decision later led to Judge Torres overruling the SEC’s objection to releasing the above documents, denying the agency’s motion to seal them, and ordering their release to the public, as she observed that Judge Netburn had made no error in her earlier decision, as Finbold reported. 

Positive outcome for Ripple, XRP, and crypto

More recently, Judge Torres ruled that the XRP token was not a security, as well as that Ripple’s issuance and sales of the cryptocurrency did not constitute securities sales and, therefore, did not belong under the jurisdiction of the SEC as a regulator.

According to John E. Deaton, a pro-XRP lawyer and amicus curiae for Ripple during these court proceedings, such a decision was a “total victory” for digital asset holders and crypto developers in the US and a “devastating blow to the SEC’s ambition to bring an entire asset class under its thumb.”

As such, Deaton believes it should warrant the finance watchdog to reevaluate and modify its regulatory approach to the crypto industry, as well as to backtrack and return to its original goal, which is to protect investors on US soil instead of  “wasting taxpayer dollars and failing the American people.”

Meanwhile, XRP, the token at the center of the lawsuit, was at press time changing hands at the price of $0.781, up 5.11% on the day, 64.84% across the past week, and 59.83% in the last month and is now eyeing the critical $1 mark, as per the latest data retrieved on July 19.

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