As the Ripple/XRP lawsuit enters the crucial July 13 deadline with the Hinman docs soon to be revealed, one community member was keen to hear Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse’s thoughts on the event.
Garlinghouse acknowledged the 18-month delay and expressed a desire to give into more detail but did not want to “overstep” this important public disclosure. He and legal officer Stuart Alderoty also felt that the wait had been well worth it.
The XRP community is waiting with bated breath as the much-anticipated date has passed, and the SEC is now required by court order to make available the unedited copies of each email Hinman sent or received between 9 AM EST and 12 PM EST.
The controversy surrounding the documents centers on William Hinman, a former SEC director, and a contentious speech he delivered in 2018 in which he asserted that Ethereum, like Bitcoin, was “sufficiently decentralized” and was thus immune from federal securities law.
In Ripple’s argument, Hinman seemed to prefer “two winners” in the cryptocurrency space, namely Bitcoin and Ethereum, at the expense of XRP, in his public remark.
Additionally, the SEC’s request to seal the documents under the guise of shielding witnesses from potential abuse has given the defendants more reason to push for their release because they think doing so will help shed light on the legal standing of Ripple-affiliated XRP token.
To recall on May 16, the U.S. District Court’s Judge Analisa Torres rejected the SEC’s request to have the Hinman documents sealed.
Ripple: All Eyes On Hinman Emails
SEC argued that the documents should be sealed because of the “clear lack of relevance of these documents to the summary judgment motions” and because their disclosure “would be highly prejudicial” to the commission.
Judge Torres ruled that Hinman docs “are judicial documents subject to a strong presumption of public access” because they are “relevant to the performance of the judicial function and useful in the judicial process.”
Nevertheless, the documents’ upcoming unsealing is being eagerly followed by the crypto community at a time when the US regulator has launched some of the strongest legal offensives against major figures in the digital asset market.