The U.S Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed an interlocutory brief signaling its intention to overturn the ruling on XRP not being a security.
In an August 9 court filing addressed to Judge Analisa Torres, who ruled on Ripple’s “programmatic” sales of its XRP token, the SEC stated that it will be appealing part of the judge’s decision.
On July 14, Judge Torres found that XRP bought by retail investors on exchanges did not qualify as securities because they followed a blind bid process. However, she ruled that direct XRP sales to institutional investors made the same tokens securities.
In its brief, the regulator cited a recent case against Terraform Labs and its founder, Do Kwon, where the presiding judge dismissed Judge Torres’s reasoning in the XRP case.
The SEC’s decision to appeal comes when several XRP-related exchange-traded products (ETPs) are witnessing a resurgence in the market following Ripple’s partial victory.
According to data from Fineqia International, a prominent mover in the crypto investment space, XRP-linked ETPs have seen upswings as high as 57% year-to-date. Fineqia’s numbers indicate that the XRP-related assets under management are currently valued upwards of $76 million, signaling growing institutional interest in the token.
However, there remains fear among certain market watchers of a successful SEC appeal, undoing the gains achieved by XRP over the past month and possibly causing a significant price crash.