Ripple v. SEC: Lawyer rejects claims XRP is not commodity

After the cryptocurrency community has finally received a conclusion to the long-running battle between Ripple and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), not everyone agrees on what it means for the cryptocurrency at its center – $XRP.

Specifically, X user ScamDaddy shared his belief that “there is no clarity as to what type of asset $XRP is, just what it is not” in the ruling, sparking a major debate on the social platform, during which legal expert Bill Morgan rejected the argument that it is not a commodity, in an X post on November 13.

According to ScamDaddy, when Judge Analisa Torres “deemed Ripple’s sales to institutions as unregistered securities, she said ‘parties did not view the $XRP sale as a sale of a commodity,’” and he also shared an excerpt from the court documents that appears to support his argument.

Judge’s actual views

However, Morgan pointed out that in the summary judgment motions excerpt, Judge Torres was “expressing her reasons on why that particular category of sales (to institutional buyers) were investment contracts,” as well as that “it was the SEC who defined the categories of sales,” adding that:

“Yet the judge’s view of $XRP is not found in her treatment of the three categories of sales. It is found in the two-page section (pages 14-15) in which she analyzed the token itself (within the framework of Howey). That section of the judgment notably is entitled “A. The $XRP token.”

As the lawyer further stressed, the Judge separated $XRP from the contract, transaction, or selling scheme by “stating that the ‘subject’ (…) is ‘not necessarily a security,’” as well as listing “tangible and intangible assets” in which “the ‘subject of the investment contract was a standalone commodity, which was not itself inherently an investment contract.’”

Finally, Morgan took one last jab at the critic and Bitcoin (BTC) maxis, accusing them of trying to confuse the wider public regarding Judge Torres’s finding on what the $XRP token is and making the matter more complicated, arguing that her ruling has provided the $XRP community with a “weapon” against such attempts:

Elsewhere, the $XRP token’s price at the time of publication stood at $0.6542. This represents a 2.36% drop on the day and a decline of 5.45% across the previous week while maintaining the 34.88% gain accumulated on its monthly chart, as per the most recent information on November 13.

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