Court orders Ripple to pay $125M civil penalty in SEC lawsuit

The payment falls between the SEC’s requested $2 billion penalty and Ripple’s proposal of $10 million

August 7, 2024 04:24 pm

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse | Ben Solomon Photo LLC for Blockworks

A federal judge has ordered Ripple to pay a civil penalty of $125,035,150 in its lawsuit with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC had sought a remittance payment of $2 billion while Ripple had requested a maximum penalty of $10 million.

Ripple is also ordered to stop any further violations of securities laws, Judge Analisa Torres wrote in Wednesday’s court filing. Torres denied the SEC’s motion for disgorgement and prejudgment interest, claiming that the securities regulator had not demonstrated “pecuniary harm” to require such.

The ruling comes years after the SEC filed its initial complaint against Ripple in December 2020. The XRP issuer was eventually handed a partial victory through a summary judgment in July 2023, in which Torres ruled that while Ripple’s institutional sales of XRP were found to constitute an unregistered securities offering, programmatic sales were not.

Torres decided on the $125 million figure — which is a remittance payment related to institutional sales of XRP — by determining that there were 1,278 transactions that violated Section 5 of the Securities Act.

The court in 2023 also mandated a trial for the remaining matters in the dispute. These included accusations of aiding and abetting securities law violations against CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen. However, the SEC dropped these charges in October.

Start your day with top crypto insights from David Canellis and Katherine Ross. Subscribe to the Empire newsletter.

Explore the growing intersection between crypto, macroeconomics, policy and finance with Ben Strack, Casey Wagner and Felix Jauvin. Subscribe to the Forward Guidance newsletter.

Get alpha directly in your inbox with the 0xResearch newsletter — market highlights, charts, degen trade ideas, governance updates, and more.

The Lightspeed newsletter is all things Solana, in your inbox, every day. Subscribe to daily Solana news from Jack Kubinec and Jeff Albus.

Tags

Newsletter

Blockworks Daily

Upcoming Events

Digital Asset Summit 2025

Javits Center North | 445 11th Ave

Tues - Thurs, March 18 - 20, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

buy tickets learn more

recent research

Research

Bitcoin Expressivity with BitcoinOS

The BitcoinOS team is the first to have developed and posted a ZK-compressed proof on the Bitcoin network. Other proof verification efforts have been limited to the Signet or testnet deployments. Their work has resulted in the development of BitSNARK, a software library for ZK-compressed fraud proofs on the Bitcoin network. The project aims to provide a horizontal scaling solution, offering a one-stop shop for teams interested in developing a rollup on Bitcoin. This approach shares similarities with the horizontal tech stack scaling in other ecosystems like Cosmos and Optimism, particularly in its focus on simplified verification, bridging standards, and lightweight interoperability.

by 0xMims