Attorney and XRP supporter John Deaton is warning of a harsher regulatory environment for the crypto industry if the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) emerges victorious in its lawsuit against Ripple.
Deaton says in a new Real Vision Crypto interview that in the event that the court rules that Ripple sold XRP as an unregistered security, it would result in “more aggressiveness” from the SEC over the next couple of years.
“If she [Presiding Judge Analisa Torres] agrees with the SEC, then I think we’re going to see a slew of more enforcements…
Think about it, XRP was the third-largest crypto asset by market cap when the lawsuit was filed. It was traded in the United States for seven and a half years, the U.S. Government Accountability Office in 2014 called it a virtual currency in a decentralized payment system…
The point I’m getting at is if XRP was deemed a security by the judge if she agrees with it and it has that kind of history – the third-largest, traded for years and years, it implicates so many other tokens.
What message does it send to Algorand and Stellar Lumens and Cardano or whatever? Take the top-ten market caps, it would implicate all those tokens. And so I think we would see even more aggressiveness for a couple of years.”
According to Deaton, while a loss for Ripple could embolden the SEC and its chair Gary Gensler to be more aggressive against the crypto industry, a win for the payments firm would have the opposite effect.
“If the decision is bad for Ripple and XRP and crypto in general, it’s going to gain more momentum for Gary Gensler and the SEC.
If the judge stops them in their tracks and says this is overreach, this is government intrusion and kind of slaps them down, then I think we’re going to see maybe Gensler lose a lot of his political momentum.”
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