On October 31, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, held at the Thurgood Marshall US Courthouse in New York, ordered the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to file its brief on or before January 15, 2025. This follows the SEC’s request on October 24 to extend the deadline for its principal brief to January 15, 2025.
The US SEC litigated the appeal case following Judge Analisa Torres’s final ruling, which concluded that XRP sales on cryptocurrency exchanges do not constitute investment contracts under the Howey test. However, Judge Torres ordered Ripple to pay a fine of $125 million for violating the SEC’s securities laws in XRP sales to institutional investors.
What Next for The Ripple vs SEC Case
As the Ripple vs. SEC case awaits a hearing and ruling of the Second Circuit of Appeals, the crypto community is hoping Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump will win the elections. Moreover, Trump has vowed to foster crypto development in the United States by firing SEC chair Gary Gensler and hiring Web3 experts.
In case Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris wins the election, experts believe that the crypto persecution will continue in the next four years.
Meanwhile, Ripple is pushing the Second Circuit Court, through its pre-argument statement, to uphold Judge Torres’s ruling, which largely saw XRP as not a security under the Howey test.
Impact on the XRP Market
The mainstream adoption of XRP has significantly slowed down in the past years due to ongoing legal uncertainties. The emergence of other cryptocurrency projects, which offer the same web3 functionality as XRP has been a huge blow to the Ripple ecosystem.
Most importantly, the SEC’s case continues to drag amid the anticipated altseason in the coming months. As a result, Wall Street analysts believe that XRP price could again underperform in the 2024/2025 crypto bull market.
The large-cap altcoin, with a fully diluted valuation of about $51 billion and a daily average traded volume of around $1.4 billion, has been trapped in a multi-year symmetrical triangular pattern.