Key takeaways:
- The US SEC has filed an appeal in response to a court ruling in its action against Ripple Labs.
- The SEC noted that requesting an interlocutory review of the decision was appropriate while the matter was still pending.
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed an appeal in response to a court ruling from its action against Ripple Labs, which determined that the sale of XRP to individual investors does not constitute the sale of a security.
The SEC stated its belief that Judge Analisa Torres’ ruling merits a second opinion from an appellate court in a letter sent to her on August 9 as the case’s presiding judge.
It said that numerous other ongoing court matters may be impacted by the decision of the appeal and urged Judge Torres to halt the case during the appeal.
Several cryptocurrency companies, including Binance and Coinbase, are involved in a legal dispute with the SEC over suspected security breaches.
The SEC noted that requesting an interlocutory review of the decision was appropriate while the matter was still pending. The SEC claimed:
“These two issues involve controlling questions of law on which there is substantial ground for differences of opinion as reflected by an intra-district split that has already developed.”
According to the SEC, the court’s ruling that Ripple’s programmatic XRP offers, sales on cryptocurrency exchanges, and individual sales were not securities should be certified.
In its lawsuit against Terraform Labs, the SEC also cited the judge’s decision, which overturned Torres’ conclusion and stated that cryptocurrencies sold on exchanges might possibly be securities.
The SEC’s letter comes about a month after Ripple won a battle with the SEC over the status of XRP as a security.
According to Torres, the XRP coin is not a security in and of itself. However, she said that certain XRP token sales, such as those made to institutional investors, can be considered securities but not transactions made to regular traders on exchanges.
When the SEC’s lawyers urged Judge Jed Rakoff of the same court to disregard the decision while he deliberated Terraform Labs’ application to dismiss its own SEC litigation, the judge gave a previous indication that the regulator may appeal the decision in a different case.
