Ripple CEO: SEC Will Fine Company $2 Billion

Federal regulators want blockchain firm Ripple to pay a nearly $2 billion fine.

That’s according to company officials who took to social media in advance of the publication of court documents scheduled for Tuesday (March 26) to criticize the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) proposed punishment.

“The SEC plans to ask the Judge for $2B in a case that involved no allegations (let alone findings) of fraud or recklessness,” Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse wrote on Twitter.

(That post also included a GIF of Logan Roy from the HBO series “Succession” telling his children, “You are not serious people.”)

“There is absolutely no precedent for this,” Garlinghouse said. “We will continue to expose the SEC for what they are when we respond to this.”

That response will come next month, according to a separate Twitter post by Stuart Alderoty, Ripple’s chief legal officer, who called the SEC “a regulator that trades in statements that are false, mischaracterized and designed to mislead.”

A spokesperson for the SEC declined to comment for this story when reached by PYMNTS Tuesday morning.

The commission sued Ripple in 2020, accusing the company of conducting a $1.3 billion unregistered securities offering tied to its XRP token.

But last year, a judge found that only Ripple’s institutional — and not retail — sales of XRP violated the law, a ruling largely considered a victory for the cryptocurrency sector.

As PYMNTS noted at the time, that decision has “far-ranging repercussions across the digital asset ecosystem, which has long argued that its tokens do not represent securities contracts.”

Ripple won another court victory last year when the SEC announced it would dismiss its claims that Garlinghouse and Executive Chairman Chris Larsen aided and abetted the company’s alleged securities law violations.

Meanwhile, the company announced recently that it is working on expanding its payments business in the United States.

For now, the vast majority of Ripple’s business is based overseas, Ripple Senior Director and Head of Product Marketing W. Oliver Segovia said in February, though that could soon change.

“After being relatively quiet for the past 3 years in the US for Ripple Payments, we’re geared up to announce new product updates powered by our money transmitter licenses (MTLs) that cover the majority of US states,” Segovia wrote on LinkedIn.