CEO Says Ripple Is Doing ‘Exceedingly Well’ in SEC Illegal-Securities Lawsuit

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse thinks the company has a good chance of winning its court case with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a CNBC report said.

“The lawsuit has gone exceedingly well, and much better than I could have hoped when it began about 15 months ago,” Garlinghouse said at a CNBC-hosted fireside chat at the Paris Blockchain Week Summit on Thursday (April 14). “But the wheels of justice move slowly.”

The case concerns allegations that Ripple, Garlinghouse and Chris Larsen, the executive chairman, have been engaging in an illegal securities offering through sales of XRP, a cryptocurrency that the company uses commercially and has close ties to.

Ripple disputed the charges. Ripple has argued that XRP should be treated as a virtual currency, not an investment contract like a stock.

According to Garlinghouse, there is quite a lot at stake with the case.

He said it was important “not just for Ripple; it’s important for the entire crypto industry in the United States,” and added that it would be “really negative” for crypto, making it so most tokens would be classed as securities.

That would mean platforms would have to register with the SEC as broker dealers, which would add cost and friction.

The judge ruled earlier in the week that the SEC can’t edit the contents of emails purporting to show that there had been conflicts of interest in how the SEC deals with XRP versus other tokens.

CNBC wrote that Ripple makes use of XRP to facilitate cross-border transactions, and that the company owns the bulk of the 100 billion XRP tokens in circulation. It periodically releases them from an escrow account to keep prices stable.

See also: Ripple Lawyer Confident SEC Case Will Wrap in April

In January, PYMNTS wrote that Ripple was confident the lawsuit would be over by April.

Jeremy Hogan, part of the Ripple community, said there’s not much chance of the suit getting extended beyond this month.

The report notes that Garlinghouse had said around that time that the judge seemed to realize the case “wasn’t solely about Ripple” and would have broader implications.