What Crypto-Investors Don’t Understand About SEC’s Case Against Ripple

Ripple’s XRP cryptocurrency has increased in value by almost 300 percent in the last few weeks. The increase was based on some court rulings against the SEC in its case against Ripple, which alleges that XRP is a security that ought to be registered with regulators rather than being freely distributed like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Ripple’s attorneys are on the offensive, subjecting the SEC to a barrage of information requests, creating the impression that a win is inevitable. What many don’t realize is that the SEC has already won a similar case. It was against TON – a cryptocurrency project of Telegram messenger, a rising competitor of WhatsApp – which had a plan to do something like what Ripple did, pre-issue cryptocurrency and collect investments in fiat money against it. A decision that XRP is a security won’t mean it’s worthless, but whether its value is fairly reflected by the current rally is an open question. A loss would mean XRP has to be delisted from all US cryptocurrency exchanges immediately.