Blockchain payment firm Ripple has hired two Kellogg Hansen lawyers Kylie Chiseul Kim and Clayton J. Masterman to strengthen its legal fight against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC].
The new addition of the attorneys indicates that legal proceedings may drag on for some time.
But Stuart Alderoty, general counsel of the payment giant, stated that a final resolution would likely come in 2023.
The lawsuit filed by the SEC in late 2020, alleged that founders of Ripple Labs Inc, Brad Garlinghouse, and Chris Larsen had illegally sold XRP as unregistered security to raise $1.3 billion. The tussle continued back and forth.
In mid-April, the blockchain firm appeared to have gained a small victory in its case after Judge Sarah Netburn denied SEC’s request to reconsider its decision to surrender certain documents that showed its former Director William Hinman’s declaring Bitcoin and Ether as Non- Securities.
Things took a new turn when the SEC managed to keep Hinman’s documents out of Ripple’s reach citing the latter’s specific conflicts of interest with those cryptocurrencies.
Ex Ripple Exec Jed McCaleb’s XRP Stash Down By 81.5M
In other news, former Ripple CTO Jed McCaleb was left with only 81.53 million XRP to sell.
Since his exit from the firm in 2014 Caleb, once held billions of XRP tokens in 2014, after which he went on to start Stellar’s blockchain project.
In February 2021, reports showed that McCaleb sold large quantities of XRP. It was assumed his stash would eventually dry up by May 2021, if the selling persisted at that rate.
But to everyone’s surprise, the top exec was still dumping XRP and one observer noted on June 29, 2022, that around 22 million of the tokens were sold in three days.
Since his stint at Ripple, he held roughly 9 billion XRP and has been selling the tokens since then.
At one time, Ripple and McCaleb signed an agreement that required the latter to lock some of his funds in order to protect the XRP from price swings.
Although, when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] filed the suit against Ripple, McCaleb responded by pausing the ‘Tacostand’ selling for a period.