Ripple: Great hope in SEC dispute bursting?
Ripple has high hopes for the release of the infamous Hinman documents in the SEC litigation. Neutral people are disappointed after the disclosure. The accused crypto company itself is completely convinced of the importance of private messages until then.
Ripple: Great hope in SEC dispute bursting?
Is Ripple’s great hope shattered in the SEC dispute? New documents have recently been released in the course of the litigation. They document an internal SEC discussion about the pre-production of a speech by William Hinman.
It is about the notorious “Hinman speech”, in which the then SEC employee made a legal assessment of Ethereum . Hinman was the chief of the SEC’s corporate finance department at the time.
The new documents now show emails Hinman sent to senior SEC colleagues who belonged to other departments. In it he writes: “I would like to know your assessment.”
In an attached version of Hinman’s speech, the American describes Ethereum as an investment that originally started as a security. In the speech that was finally delivered , he adjusted his catchy opinion. So he said:
Based on my understanding of the current state of Ether, the Ethereum network and its decentralized structure, current offerings and sales of Ether are not securities transactions.
Ripple and XRP currency supporters pinned high hopes on the release of Hinman’s previously unknown emails. For example, they could have uncovered agreements between the Ethereum Foundation and the stock exchange supervisory authority that would explain any bias.
However, such backgrounds cannot be identified in the e-mails. The disclosed news even caused disappointment on Twitter. Gabriel Shapiro, general counsel at investment firm Delphi Labs, says they’re useless.
Hinman Documents Not Strengthening XRP?
Shapiro tweeted: “ The Hinman emails are nothing – just great for ETH . No idea why Ripple thinks these emails are helping the Ripple case…”
The fact that there were agreements between leading heads of the SEC and Ethereum could strengthen the accused company Ripple, but this information was sufficiently known even without the documents being published.
The emails were touted as groundbreaking. These emails are not a bombshell for the Ripple case, although the additional flags are interesting from a legal standpoint to see how different people at the SEC felt about the issues at the time.
Sums up Shapiro. All new publications can be found online in the Docket Entry 831 collection .
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse considers the importance of the news to be very important. According to this, they have been waiting for their publication for more than 18 months and have now taken a big step in the right direction.
Garlinghouse and Ripple’s legal counsel, Stuart Alderoty, believe the Hinman filings show the SEC’s bias. The authority made a conscious effort to invent different standards based on different cryptocurrencies that do not exist in reality.
Because the SEC designed Ethereum as a commodity, other cryptocurrencies would have to be as similar as possible to the smart contract platform in order to be classified equally. The authority uses structural differences between XRP and ETH as an argument that XRP is not a commodity but a security.
“For the SEC to sue Chris Larsen and myself personally for the alleged sale of unregistered securities when their own chief of staff deliberately created confusion about it… well, I don’t have a single polite word to describe this regrettable, politically motivated overreaching.” Like Garlinghouse.
Alderoty adds: “We can all now see that Hinman ignored multiple warnings, that his speech contained a contrived analysis that had no legal basis, was disconnected from the Howey factors, revealed regulatory loopholes and not just confusion but ‘major confusion” would create in the market.”
