Judge Fines Ripple $125M, Bans Future Securities Law Violations

[quantified]

> A federal judge ordered Ripple to pay $125 million in civil penalties and imposed an injunction against future securities law violations on Wednesday.

What does an injunction against future violations mean? Why would that be weightier than the criminal legal code? Shouldn't such an injunction be assumed by pretty much everybody doing anything?

[gexla]

I the words of Humpty in the Humpty Dance...

"Alright, stop what you're doin' 'cause I'm about to ruin."

Seems to me that this is a fast changing space of product offerings vs adaptation of regulations. Some transactions violated, some did not. Some planned future Ripple developments could cross the line. Seems that Ripple just needs to continue working the system, so the regulations catch up and give the entire space some guidance on what they can and can't do.

Overall a positive development. The penalty was reduced from something like 2Bs and XRP jumped 20% on the news.

[nullc]

A lot of these things don't have serious consequences attached to the rule, so by ordering the party to comply they get the penalties of contempt attached.

[tsunamifury]

It’s poorly written. The injunction is against further institutional sales (what they were accused of possibly doing in a way that was illegal) with out explicit review per sale.

[superb_dev]

I’m assuming it’s like probation for an individual

[TacticalCoder]

In case anyone else is confused by the wording:

> A federal judge imposed a $125 million fine on Ripple after finding last year that its institutional sales of XRP violated federal securities laws.

OK so it violated the SEC rules for the institutional sales.

> The judge reiterated her view that Ripple's programmatic sales of XRP to retail clients through exchanges did not violate federal securities laws.

But it did not violate the SEC rules for the sales to retail.

I was confused at first. As someone else wrote in the thread: it's poorly worded.

[intuitionist]

It’s doubly confusing because the decision protects the weak, helpless institutional investor while leaving the ruthless sharks that are retail clients to fend for themselves.

[telotortium]

Also

> The $125.035 million fine is well below the $1 billion in disgorgement and prejudgment interest and $900 million in civil penalties the SEC sought.

[seanhunter]

I don't think you're the only person confused by this ruling. Particularly it seems very strange for something to be ok to sell to retail but not to institutions. The rules on what institutions can buy are generally far broader than retail because of the SEC's "investor protection" mandate.

[ur-whale]

XRP (Ripple), the "crypto" currency with none of the attributes that make real cryptocurrencies interesting:

    - XRP is managed centrally by mostly unknown folks (this is its worst attribute)
    - therefore supply isn't fixed and unverifiable
    - therefore transactions are ultimately reversible
    - protocol security is a joke (see other's remarks in this thread)
    - XRP is not anonymous
    - XRP was pre-mined
    - etc ...

Regarding supply management, it's basically even worse than the US dollar in that instead of folks (the fed) that are eventually answerable to mismanagement mistakes, the Ripple supply is managed by a bunch of people somewhere that you have no control over.

Also, being a very, very distant cousin of Bitcoin, and almost unknown to the masses, it has received almost no scrutiny from the tech. crowd.

Basically, XRP is the equivalent of a county fair token, managed by the local carnies.

I still baffles me to this day that anyone would still pay attention to it.

Walk away from that garbage fire as quickly as you can.

[cmcaleer]

I do find the cultish following XRP continues to have kind of fascinating. Obviously a lot of it is astroturfed but surely some amount of it is real. So many twitter and reddit accounts where all people do is shill their bags when, as you say, basically nothing interesting is happening in the XRP ecosystem.

It's like a religion. It reminds me of the weirder side of the Gamestop stuff.

[monero-xmr]

This was the worst possible outcome for the SEC. XRP is basically a centralized blockchain and they did an ICO back in the day. If XRP isn't a security, basically nothing is, and expect a new boom in retail coin offerings.

[thinkmassive]

On top of the ICO there were some shenanigans with the early ledger (oops our servers ran out of memory), making the whole thing that exists today based on "trust us bro, we promise there’s exactly as many coins as we say there are"

It’s not really exciting, mostly just disappointing they’re still in business, but anyone who wants to learn more can look up: XRPL genesis block

[nthitz]

XRP up about 20% since the news as of writing

[samstave]

I think we should have a national penalties fund that every single corporate penalty goes into and it specifically can only be spent on various categories of things that are for the public good, but it by popular vote in each category - (Like how we vote for new features in a game, like Manor Lord, ironically enough in such an Oligarchy as it were)...

Anyway - for each industry from which the violations occur, those resources go into these buckets where no politicians allowed - and voting will havent for a GovFundMe Campaign - and it gets funded and every single action on that thing is trackable actively by everyone who voted for the thing and a tracking status board for the implementation of them. And who needed to be shamed in order for that GovFundMe campaign to be completed.

[Dylan16807]

That sounds interesting, but make sure it's only funding one-offs.

We don't want a repeat of lotteries funding schools, where that money becomes expected and then the government doesn't give as much direct funding.

[CamelCaseName]

The SEC continues to be a huge disappointment.

All the sales made to retail were not protected, simply because they went through an exchange.

I'm so tired of waiting for regulatory authorities and legislators to wake up and do their job.

[loeg]

Blame the court for this bad decision -- it's the SEC's position that the sales to retail were also problematic.

[yieldcrv]

This is a false dilemma

Accountability and deterrence doesn’t have to come from the SEC

The SEC contains people passionate about this, but that doesn't mean they are the specific authority eligible

The FTC exists too, they are aware of their capabilities in the crypto space. They have circulars since 2017 as well.

There is also Congress. Agency deference is dead anyway.

[Havoc]

One can ban future crimes?

I guess we just solved crime!

[ceejayoz]

> The injunction document requires Ripple to file a registration statement if it intends to sell any securities.

Seems reasonable.

[jeffreyq]

something something minority report

[ESTheComposer]

In case anyone just reads the headline, this is not a good result for the SEC. Judge reduced the fine from 2B to 125m (94%) and deemed retail sales of XRP was not a security.

SEC has been trying to label pretty much every crypto a security, and XRP is probably the closest thing to one, so if they couldn’t get this…

[cryptica]

It's just sad how the corporate-government complex wastes taxpayer money suing itself. Ripple and the government are two sides of the same scam. One scammer operating a monetary ponzi scheme is suing another scammer for taking advantage of the ponzi to scam other people... Using the tax money of the actual victims to pay for the legal proceedings and/or damages that one scammer did to the other scammer.

Meanwhile, both scammers pretend to be working for the victims... And many of the victims are so f** stupid, they actually believe one side or the other.

I blame Hollywood for brainwashing everyone into believing that every story has a good guy and a bad guy. WRONG. Most stories in our society only have bad guys.

[ur-whale]

> One scammer operating a monetary ponzi scheme is suing another scammer for taking advantage of the ponzi to scam other people

That's an old argument, best summarized as "when it comes to milking the masses, the government does not like competition"