The fight for regulatory clarity “has to continue,” according to Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, despite the fact that Ripple’s legal battle with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is “coming to a close.” In response to the June 13 unsealing of the Hinman Documents in the continuing legal dispute between Ripple and the SEC, Garlinghouse posted a video to Twitter where he discussed the timeline of the case and voiced his displeasure with the SEC.The Hinman documents, according to Garlinghouse in a video from June 17, imply that the SEC “knowingly created confusion about the rules, and they used that confusion through enforcement.”
Garlinghouse harshly slammed the SEC’s conduct in his remarks, calling them a blatant instance of “bad faith, plain and simple.”He asserts that this mindset has existed since the lawsuit against Ripple’s initial filing in December 2020, calling it a “very Grinch-like touch” to bring the complaint “days before Christmas.”This is the epitome of prioritizing politics over people, he said, and the pursuit of power over wise policy.According to Garlinghouse, he responded to “every question [the SEC] had” prior to the case being filed, and he was never told that XRP was a security.
He contends that the Hinman speech is more about the SEC’s overall position against the crypto sector than “any one token or any one blockchain,” and that the SEC is “looking to kill” innovation and the cryptocurrency industry in the U.S.“This is about demonstrating the extent to which the SEC has relentlessly pursued action against crypto players while professing fake open arms and calls to come in and register, all the while fabricating their purported guidance,” the article reads. In addition, according to Garlinghouse, the records “at best” imply that senior SEC officials “couldn’t agree” on the regulation and warned Bill Hinman personally not to “confuse the public about the rules for crypto.”
On June 13, Cointelegraph reported that annotations in the publicized documents suggested the editors were concerned that Hinman’s declaration that Ether is not a security may make it “difficult for the agency to take a different position on Ether in the future.”However, Garlinghouse claimed that “at worst,” the records demonstrated that Hinman “deliberately ignored the law” and attempted to “create new laws.”
He underlined the need for cooperation throughout the sector because the SEC might go after additional crypto businesses in the future. The struggle for transparency must go on, he said, noting that while our legal case is finally coming to an end, for so many others it is only getting started.As of June 5, the SEC sued cryptocurrency exchange Binance for allegedly providing unregistered securities. A day later, the agency took similar action against Coinbase.