XRP and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have been on opposite sides for quite some time now. While Ripple and the token deal with their battle, a new member seems to have gotten caught up in this feud.
Brad Sherman, a congressman from California, became a trending topic on Twitter on Thursday after a senior journalist for Fox Business Network (FBN) claimed that Sherman had spoken publicly about his opinion that Ripple would be easily defeated in the SEC’s legal challenge to its unregistered sales of XRP. As a result, the congressman was in touch with SEC Chairman Gary Gensler to develop the case, according to the media site. Sherman, though, denounced this on Twitter as fake news.
According to the congressman, the news source “has it partially wrong.” While he frequently interacts with SEC Chair Gensler, he also brings up cryptocurrency in those conversations, he continued. Sherman insisted, though, that he has never spoken with anyone about the token. After that, he determined that Director Gurbir Grewal’s testimony was the only interaction he had with an SEC official regarding the token.
Sherman questions SEC about XRP lawsuit
Congressman Sherman questioned Gurbir Grewal, the SEC’s director of enforcement, earlier this week to find out why the agency was pursuing Ripple and the altcoin when it could have been looking into crypto exchanges that dealt in the altcoin cryptocurrency. Sherman said,
“You’ve gone after XRP because XRP is a security, but you haven’t gone after all the major crypto exchanges that process tens of thousands, if not far more, transactions”. He added that “if XRP is a security — and you think it is, and I think it is — why are these crypto exchanges not in violation of the law?”
Grewal did not reply appropriately and stated that he was bound by secrecy and could not discuss the issues that the SEC was looking into or not looking into. However, he also brought up the SEC’s lawsuit against Poloniex, a cryptocurrency exchange, for providing unregistered securities. Despite this, Sherman argued that the SEC is targeting tiny fish because it’s practical.
He further asserted,
“It’s easier to go after the small fish than the big fish, but the big fish operating the major exchanges did many, many, tens of thousands of transactions with XRP. You know it’s [a] security, that means they were illegally operating a securities exchange.”
Sherman further pointed out that a lot of cryptocurrency exchange platforms have stopped offering XRP exchanges.
