Erik Hilz

[Cowboy.X @cowboycrypto313]

👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀
As the American Bankers Associations tries to halt licenses for @circle and @Ripple, guess who they are a major donor to? Anti Crypto Congressman Brad Sherman.

Sherman even hired the American Banker Association’s ex lobbyist, Sam Mayper, in 2023 as his Senior Legislative Assistant. Makes sense.

[Fred Rispoli @freddyriz]

SEC v. Ripple Update: This is a long post on my thoughts here but the TLDR is: "Welcome to the new SEC, for now more or less the same as the last one." And: Ripple and SEC will settle the appeal for the reduced, agreed upon amount and leave the Torres judgment in place, while the SEC will publicly or privately communicate to Ripple that it is not restricted in its business operations with Ripple transparent about those operations and demonstrating how they no longer fall into the category that was deemed illegal by Torres.

I thought Judge Torres would grant the first motion, recognizing that the anti-crypto war of the Gensler Era was political animus and that the agency was moving in a different direction under new leadership. There was zero obstacle to her granting the motion and moving on. She chose not to. There are only two reasons for this. One, she was pissed that the parties wasted 4.5 years of her time with bitter litigation. This reason is 100% in play. Two, she is hostile to the Trump administration and will do what she can to throw up obstacles. This reason is 100% in play for some federal judges (it is no matter who is in charge as there are judges that are political rather than objective). I'm not sure if this reason is in play for Torres but now I will be following her other cases to test this hypothesis.

Once Torres denied the first motion, and the language she used in so doing, it was clear that the @SECGov (and to a lesser extent, @Ripple) needed to do some begging in the second motion and both utterly failed. Pages 3 and 4 of this ruling parrot back the SEC's own words of how egregious, dangerous, and reckless the SEC believed Ripple to be and why a $1 BILLION fine was necessary. I said that the second motion had to have some actual testimony by SEC Commissioners (meaning affidavits/declarations) to counter this, such as "I, Commissioner Peirce, voted against this ridiculous lawsuit because it was a waste of our enforcement resources and unfair in light of our piss poor guidance to crypto companies." Or: "I, Commissioner Atkins, took over as Chair with a mandate to correct the wrongs of the prior SEC regarding crypto guidelines. A majority of the commissioners determined the SEC enforcement division under the prior administration acted arbitrarily, capriciously and often with bad faith in targeting crypto companies. The most serious example of that, of course, being the Debt Box case where our attorneys were so brazen in their unethical behavior that the SEC was sanctioned in excess of a million dollars and the lawyers were terminated. Our position in the Ripple litigation was misguided and flat our wrong. The court should evaluate all prior pleadings from the context that our enforcement attorneys acted in a partisan manner and not out of faithful allegiance to the law, as Judge Netburn noted herself in this case."

This obviously did not happen and there are only two reasons why: (1) Ripple and the SEC did not discuss this necessity. I find it hard to believe this to be the case, as it could arguably be legal malpractice if the attempt was not made. (2) Ripple did ask and the SEC said, "We are not making ourselves look like idiot assholes. This crappy motion on SEC letterhead is the best I can offer <insert pawn shop meme>." Because (2) is likely what happened, this tells me that the SEC is going to do what it has done for decades: protect its own regardless of the administration in charge or detriment to the public. If you ever want to know the types of pieces of shit that sit atop the SEC, type into your browser "david aguirre sec whistleblower" and read up (and this happened under W Bush btw). Also, I sue .gov agencies all the time for despicable behavior they commit against my fellow American citizens. They are all like this (and I mean as institutions; there are some good folks fighting upstream but they are vastly outnumbered). This is the reason I am so invested in crypto--to opt out of our crumbling system.

Another reason you know the SEC hasn't fundamentally changed (yet at least) on crypto will be revealed on the appeal. SEC claimed it is dropping their appeal but I don't believe that has been formalized. The SEC has the power to formally drop their appeal and simply not respond to Ripple's appellate brief (i.e., leaving it unopposed) thereby giving a huge boost to Ripple winning it. I put that happening at 0%. The parties will drop their appeals, settle at $50M and move on with the injunction in place.

Regarding that injunction, it doesn't affect $XRP on the secondary markets nor will it impact XRP ETF approvals. And remember the injunction is just a piece of paper issued by a court. Although technically Torres has the ability to haul Ripple and SEC back into her court and say, "I see Ripple is selling to institutions, tell me why that is not violating my injunction," the odds of this are extremely low. In other words, the injunction only substantively matters if the SEC wants it to matter, meaning, the SEC files a motion to enforce the injunction because it believes Ripple is violating it. Torres in her ruling acknowledged this general principle on page 5. Presumably the "pro-crypto" Commission wouldn't do that. Lastly on the injunction, I have researched it but have yet to find a basis why the answer to this question has to be 'no': Doesn't the SEC have the authority to grant Ripple the exemptions and waivers required to remove any restrictions necessitated by the injunction (such as time restriction on IPO)? From my research this seems to be entirely within the executive authority of the SEC to do.

Further, Ripple has already claimed that it has changed its operations such that the behavior it got tagged for by Torres is no more. If you look at the @s_alderoty post on this ruling from today, I noticed for the first time that he used the term "historic institutional sales" to describe the Torres-determined-bad-behavior. Maybe he used it before but I didn't notice it. Anyway, this signals to me that the parties are going to settle and move on with the understanding that XRP sales to institutions will be done in a way the SEC can live with.

If you read all of this, I am impressed. Any replies that demonstrate you read the whole thing will bring me joy. At the same time, under The Reply Laws Of X, I hope to see the most appropriate reply in the comments when it comes to ridiculously long posts by a user.

[BlackRock @BlackRock]

This is "a new era for investing.” Read Larry Fink’s Letter to Investors to learn more. https://t.co/SLr1cNtWLF