As part of its ongoing legal struggle with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Ripple has filed a motion to compel the securities regulator to reveal its internal cryptocurrency trading procedures.
James Filan, an attorney who has been following the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple closely, has published a new motion document that seeks to clarify whether the SEC allowed its own staff to trade XRP, which is unregistered security, according to the regulator’s charges.
The motion, filed on behalf of a number of defendants, including Ripple Labs, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, and Ripple executive chairman Chris Larsen, asks the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York to compel the SEC to produce data on its trading policies for governing digital assets.
The motion asks the SEC to produce anonymized papers containing “trading preclearance judgments” for XRP, Bitcoin (BTC), and Ether (ETH) (ETH).
“Defendants also seek certifications detailing SEC employees’ XRP holdings — either with redactions of personal information or in aggregate form,” according to the motion action.
The defendants stated that their earlier attempts to get information from the SEC had been unsuccessful. “On July 8, July 15, August 18 and August 25, we met and spoke with the SEC on this subject without progress,” the motion stated.
The court has given the SEC until September 3 to respond to the current motion, according to Filan. The ruling was a “text-only order,” meaning no separate written order was filed, according to the attorney.
The community is anticipating an impending virtual conference with the SEC to address Ripple’s imminent move to compel the regulator to release a package of documents that defendants think are crucial to their “fair notice” defense.
The online meeting has been scheduled for Aug. 31 by Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The SEC filed a massive legal case against Ripple in December 2020, stating that XRP was a $1.3 billion unregistered securities offering, as previously reported.
Judge Netburn ruled in favor of Ripple Labs last month, allowing William Hinman, the former director of the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance, to testify.
The SEC’s executive is well-known for claiming in a 2018 speech that Ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, was not a security.
