SEC – Fintechnically Speaking

August 14, 2024August 14, 2024 by Duane Morris

District Judge Imposes $125 million fine on Ripple Labs, Demanding No Future Securities Law Infringements after 3-plus year battle with SEC

In the ongoing legal saga between Ripple Labs Inc. and the SEC, U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres of the Southern District of New York imposed a $125 million fine on Ripple Labs, a provider of digital asset infrastructure for financial services, and restrained the company from violating U.S. securities laws in the future.

The SEC v. Ripple Labs case is a significant precedent in the cryptocurrency and commercial finance legal communities. The dispute centered around whether Ripple’s sale of XRP – a cryptocurrency developed, issued and partially managed by Ripple – constituted an unregistered securities offering. The SEC contended that XRP should be classified as a security, and therefore Ripple should have registered its transactions with the SEC. However, Ripple argued that XRP is a digital currency and not a security, asserting that the SEC’s application of securities laws to XRP was inappropriate and harmful to innovation in the cryptocurrency space.

On December 22, 2020, the SEC filed an action against Ripple and two of its executives for allegedly using an unregistered digital asset security to raise funds. The SEC charged the defendants with violating the registration provisions of the Securities Act of 1933, seeking injunctive relief, disgorgement with prejudgment interest and civil penalties.

The SEC’s lawsuit stated that Ripple and the two executives started raising funds in 2013 by selling XRP digital assets to investors in the United States and other countries in an unregistered, ongoing digital asset securities offering. The term “unregistered” is key to the SEC’s allegations because the agency’s argument centered around the nature of XRP as digital asset securities and not as a simple cryptocurrency. Additionally, Ripple allegedly gave out billions of XRP in exchange for activities like market-making and labor, contrary to a monetary compensation. In consequence, the complaint alleged that the defendants violated the federal securities laws’ registration requirements by not registering or not meeting any of the exemptions to register these kind of transactions.

Ripple disagreed, arguing that it was not adequately notified of its purported violations of registration regulations. Reluctant to categorize XRP as a security, Ripple defiantly challenged the SEC in federal court. Ultimately, the court was not persuaded with this argument entirely.

In Judge Torres’ decision on July 13, 2023, the court held that XRP “is not in and of itself ‘a contract, transaction, or scheme’ that embodies the Howey requirements of an investment contract.” Ultimately, the court found that Ripple violated the securities laws in its transactions aimed to offer XRP to institutional buyers such as hedge funds. As we have written in other blog posts, the court held that the secondary market transactions were not securities. Other courts have not followed Judge Torres’ analysis as to secondary markets. The disagreement between trial level courts in various cases leaves ultimate resolution on the application of the Howey test to cryptocurrencies to the federal appellate courts and most likely the U.S. Supreme Court, unless congressional legislation arrives first.

Following the summary judgment order from a year ago, the District Court issued the final judgment on August 7, 2024, after nearly four years of litigation. The court’s summary judgment found that some of Ripple’s transactions involving the exchange or sale of XRP were not considered in violation of the securities laws. However, the court held that XRP tokens sold to institutional investors were in violation of Howey, and awarded the SEC with $125 million civil monetary penalty and issued an injunction barring the company from future violations of Section 5 of the Securities Act.

This decision highlights the ongoing challenges that crypto markets face with regard to U.S. law and regulation. In effect, law and regulation lag behind the pace of industry.

The murky U.S. legal and regulatory landscape makes for challenges for the crypto markets and its participants. While other foreign countries are developing new laws and regulations, the sector waits for the creation of the U.S. crypto framework.

Once that happens, the United States may yet have a chance to be the leading crypto market in the world.

Special thanks to law clerk Laila Salame Khouri for her assistance with this blog post.

October 10, 2023 by Duane Morris

Webinar: U.S. Law Enforcement Targets Crypto in Asia: The Tiger in the Grass ‒ What Every Crypto Actor Must Know Now

Duane Morris will present U.S. Law Enforcement Targets Crypto in Asia: The Tiger in the Grass ‒ What Every Crypto Actor Must Know Now on Thursday, November 30, 2023, from 10:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. Singapore.

About the Program

Crypto entrepreneurs and their financers and advisers are facing unprecedented enforcement activity from the U.S. government, including the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). The SEC, in particular, has taken an aggressive stance in applying U.S. securities law to internationally based cryptocurrencies, and international players in the crypto market are routinely being called to defend themselves in U.S.-based investigations and U.S. courts.

In this webinar, a Duane Morris team will discuss the basis for the SEC and DOJ’s assertion of jurisdiction over international actors so that crypto players can determine whether their actions may lead to the need to comply with U.S. securities laws. The panel will also discuss the various U.S. laws that could be triggered so that foreign crypto actors become more acquainted with U.S. laws and regulations. The focus of the webinar is to educate crypto players enough so that they understand the risks.

Speakers

Mauro Wolfe
Ramiro Rodriguez

Moderator

Vincent Nolan

Learn more about the event and Duane Morris’ Fintech Group.

Note: For those attendees located in the U.S., the time for this webinar is Wednesday, November 29, 2023, from 10:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. Eastern.

June 4, 2021June 8, 2021 by C. Neil Gray

SEC, Targeting Promoters, Enters the BitConnect Fray

The SEC last week sued several alleged promoters connected with BitConnect, accusing the individuals of participating in or aiding and abetting the offering of unregistered securities in violation of Section 5 of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 15(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and doing so without being registered as broker-dealers, as required by the federal securities laws. See SEC v. Brown, et al., No. 21 Civ. 4791 (JGK) (S.D.N.Y. May 28, 2021). According to the SEC, between January 2017 and January 2018, BitConnect, directly and through the named defendant promoters, solicited investors to participate in its “lending program,” whereby investors invested bitcoin with BitConnect in exchange for interest payments derived from value generated by a trading bot focused on profiting from the volatility of Bitcoin. According to the complaint, BitConnect guaranteed a “high rate of return” (as high as 40% per month) with “no risk” from the “safe” investment. The SEC contends the promoters—including U.S.-based Trevon Brown (a.k.a. Trevon James), Craig Grant, Ryan Maasen, and Michael Noble (a.k.a. Michael Crypto)—used social media and other communications to plug the lending program in return for referral commissions—a percentage of each investment resulting from their individual efforts and the efforts of their referral network. The SEC alleges that successful promoters also received so-called “development funds” that they could use for themselves or pass on to investors in their network. According to the complaint, the promoter defendants named in the lawsuit earned referral commissions and development funds ranging from more than $475,000 to $1.3 million. Another defendant, who allegedly served as the liaison between Bitconnect and the promoters, earned more than $2.6 million. The SEC seeks injunctive relief, disgorgement plus interest, and civil penalties. According to the SEC, its investigation is ongoing.

BitConnect’s legal troubles began in early 2018 when various state regulators, including Massachusetts and Texas) opened investigations and proceedings on BitConnect. At the same time, numerous investors filed lawsuits in federal court in Florida against BitConnect and some of the same promoters sued by the SEC last week. Those civil cases, which were consolidated, fell victim to multiple successful motion to dismiss and currently are on appeal to the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.

What can we infer from the timing of the SEC’s lawsuit? Perhaps not much. BitConnect has been condemned variously as a Ponzi scheme, a scam, a fraud, and evidence of the “common knowledge” that the Bitcoin market is being manipulated. BitConnect, then, would seem a likely candidate for the SEC’s attention. It may seem curious that the SEC’s complaint comes more than three years after state regulators and private litigants focused their efforts on BitConnect. That could simply be a function of the time required to conduct the investigation. In its press release contemporaneous with the filing of the lawsuit, the SEC thanked “the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority, the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the Ontario Securities Commission, the Romanian Financial Supervisory Authority, and the Thailand Securities and Exchange Commission.” That is a lot of helping hands. Or perhaps the SEC has other developments on its mind. There are several applications for Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) currently pending before the SEC, and the SEC has previously denied similar applications, inter alia, because of concerns about manipulation in the market for Bitcoin. So perhaps the timing is not so curious. Then again, the conduct at issue in the SEC’s lawsuit occurred in 2017-2018, making any connection to the state of the current market for Bitcoin more tenuous. At the very least, one must keep in mind the SEC’s mission to protect investors and maintain fair, orderly, and efficient markets; the SEC’s case against BitConnect reaffirms that one cannot assume that conduct well in the past has flown below or escaped the SEC’s pursuit of its mission.