John Deaton Addresses Concerns Surrounding SEC Ripple Lawsuit

Crypto lawyer John Deaton recently responded to the crypto community’s concerns surrounding the lawsuit filed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission against enterprise blockchain solution firm Ripple. The case was filed back in December 2020 and alleged the sale of unregistered securities in the form of XRP by Ripple executives.

Deaton took to Twitter earlier today to post a video that addressed the crypto community’s concerns:

The crypto community on Twitter previously cited the SEC’s lawsuit against blockchain-based file sharing and payment network LBRY to argue that a verdict in the Ripple case was taking too long despite the similarity between both lawsuits. John Deaton responded by pointing out that LBRY had not contested every element of the Howey Test which was invoked by the SEC.

Meanwhile, Ripple had contested all three elements of the Howey Test, which is used by regulators and courts to determine the security status of commodities and tokens. The crypto lawyer further pointed out that Ripple had already spent a whopping $200 million defending against the SEC’s allegations.

The crypto lawyer also highlighted the complexity of the lawsuit, given that 16 experts had contributed to the case, along with 15 amicus briefs filed by supporters of the crypto giant. Deaton added that both parties had already carried out 10 depositions each, leading to over 15,000 pages of fact witness and expert witness testimony that the court had to go through.

According to John Deaton, a million pages of documents in the lawsuit contributed to the waiting time for a summary judgment. He told his followers on Twitter that Judge Analisa Torres, who was overseeing the lawsuit, had more than 500 open cases on her docket which included 44 criminal cases. Therefore it was difficult to speed up the hearing for SEC v Ripple, despite the case’s significance for the US economic policy along with global trade and finance surrounding the crypto market.