Jason Gottlieb Quoted in The Washington Post on Ripple’s Cryptocurrency Win

Partner Jason Gottlieb was quoted in The Washington Post article entitled, “Ripple ruling threatens SEC’s crypto regulation push.” The article discussed that, despite the SEC’s push to categorize the XRP token as a security, U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres ruled that Ripple Labs’s XRP is not a security when sold in “programmatic sales,” including sales to retail investors.

“That’s a huge win for Ripple,” Jason said. The price of XRP shot up more than 65 percent after the announcement.

But the court drew a distinction between sales to institutional investors and sales to other buyers. While the initial sales of XRP to institutional buyers were offers and sales of securities, certain other later purchases and sales were not, the court ruled, and neither were other kinds of distributions such as payments to employees.

Jason explained, “In general, the ruling is a little bit better than the crypto industry had expected or even hoped for.” He added that “exchanges like Coinbase are winners in the ruling, and that while Ripple may have ‘lost’ the notion that its initial offerings to institutions were not securities, it’s a positive for the company that a large chunk of its token sales were not.”

Subscribers to The Washington Post can read the full article here.