XRP price soared by 10% after Judge Torres rejected the SEC’s request to have the Hinman documents sealed.
According to the Court order, “although the protection of sensitive, confidential, or proprietary business information is a countervailing interest that can militate in favor of sealing, conclusory statements that documents contain confidential business information” are insufficient to justify sealing.”
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.
The U.S. District Court’s Judge Analisa 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.”
The documents revolve around William Hinman, a former SEC director, and a controversial speech he gave in 2018 in which he claimed that Ethereum, like Bitcoin, was “sufficiently decentralized” and was therefore exempted from federal securities regulation.
The blockchain firm argued that Hinman’s public statement appears to favor “two winners” in the crypto space, Bitcoin and Ethereum, at the expense of XRP.
On Oct 2022, Ripple was able to secure the crucial Hinman documents from the SEC’s clutches.
The firm’s general counsel Stuart Alderoty who shared the update then called it a victory that will strengthen the legal arguments of the blockchain firm.
Alderoty also stated that the documents, which are internal SEC emails and drafts, remain confidential prior to that [at the SEC’s insistence].
The Hinman Speech Documents “would reasonably have the tendency to influence [the Court’s] ruling on a motion,” he said at that time.
In its prolonged legal battle with the SEC, which contends that sales of Ripple’s XRP broke American securities laws, the blockchain payment firm has viewed the speech as a crucial piece of evidence.
Following the news, XRP is still up over 7% at $0.45.
Ripple May Lose Out Majority Control Over XRP
Given that Ripple holds a sizeable portion of the token’s supply, top executive Matt Hamilton made a recent suggestion that the firm would eventually lose control of the XRP tokens.
Hamilton proposed to disable the master key at the destination account, rendering the funds released from escrow inaccessible to anyone. This comes at a time when the community has raised concerns about the centralization of the token.