The price of XRP is up 59% after a judge delivered a long-awaited ruling in the heavily researched case of the US Securities and Exchange Commission vs. Ripple.
XRP started the day trading at $0.47 and is now trading at $0.75 after Judge Analisa Torres ruled that Ripple’s automated, open market sales of XRP are not securities.
“Indeed, Ripple’s Programmatic Sales were blind bid/ask transactions, and Programmatic Buyers had no way of knowing whether their cash payments were going to Ripple or another seller of XRP. As of 2017, Ripple’s Programmatic Sales accounted for less than 1% of global XRP trading volume. Therefore, the vast majority of individuals who bought XRP from digital asset exchanges did not invest their money in Ripple at all.
Judge Torres also rejected the SEC’s allegations that Ripple executives Brad Garlinghouse and Chris Larsen personally conducted an unregistered securities offering by selling XRP.
However, the judge sided with the SEC in its claim that Ripple’s direct sales of XRP to institutional participants did indeed represent an offering of securities.
“An institutional buyer knowingly bought XRP directly from Ripple under contract, but the economic reality is that a programmatic buyer was in the same shoes as a secondary market buyer who did not know who or what he was paying his money to…
Finally, the institutional buyers were sophisticated entities, including institutional investors and hedge funds. An “examination of the entirety of the parties’ understandings and expectations,” including the “entire set of contracts, expectations and understandings directed to the sale and distribution of” XRP supports the conclusion that a reasonable investor, positioned in the position of the Institutional buyers would have been aware of Ripple’s marketing campaign and public statements linking XRP’s price to its own efforts.
The results of the case have led to a surge in altcoin markets in general.
At the time of publication, Ethereum is up 6% in the past 24 hours, Cardano is up 16%, and Solana is up 19%.
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