A US judge doesn’t think Ripple should get to walk back the civil penalty from its XRP lawsuit just because the new leadership regime at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) now sides with the payments firm.
Ripple and the SEC first filed a joint request in May for an “indicative ruling” to see whether District Judge Analisa Torres would be open to vacating the firm’s previously assigned $125 million civil penalty and reducing it to $50 million.
Indicative rulings can be filed when a previous judgment is pending with an appeals court, but parties want to see if a district judge would be open to a motion for relief. District judges can deny the motions or express their openness to granting them should the appeals court give them permission.
Judge Torres shot down Ripple and the SEC’s joint request in May, ruling that both parties failed “to address the heavy burden they must overcome to vacate the injunction and substantially reduce the civil penalty.”
Ripple and the SEC refiled a second joint request earlier this month, outlining what they believed were the “exceptional circumstances” that merited a civil penalty reduction.
“The balance of the interests here favors entry of the relief sought by the parties. The requested relief reflects a reasonable compromise by all parties to bring this litigation to an end, to avoid litigation risk on appeal, and to avoid the further expenditure of party and judicial resources.”
Torres, however, shot down their second request in a similar fashion to the first, noting that the Supreme Court has said that court judgments aren’t just the property of the litigants; instead, they belong to the whole legal community and shouldn’t be vacated unless public interest demands it.
The SEC first sued the San Francisco-based payments firm in late 2020 for allegedly selling XRP as an unregistered security.
In 2023, Torres ruled that Ripple’s automated, open-market sales of XRP did not constitute security offerings, contrary to what the SEC alleged. The judge did, however, side with the SEC’s claim that Ripple’s sales of XRP directly to institutional buyers were securities offerings.
Last August, the judge slapped Ripple with a $125 million civil penalty, which the firm appealed. The SEC also appealed that number, arguing at the time that it was too low. The regulatory agency changed its tune toward the lawsuit after President Donald Trump took office in January and installed pro-crypto officials at the head of the commission.
XRP is trading at $2.12 at time of writing. The fourth-ranked crypto asset by market cap is down more than 3% in the past 24 hours.
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