After the controversial documents in the widely publicized drawn-out legal battle between Ripple and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) finally became public, legal expert John Deaton has dissected the details of a deposition that took place a few years later.
Indeed, on June 14, 2018, the SEC’s division director William Hinman gave his infamous speech in which he claimed Ethereum (ETH) was not a security and caused more confusion in the cryptocurrency market, despite his own team advising against it, as the documents have shown.
Three years later, on July 27, 2021, a US District Court summoned Hinman for a deposition – long before Judge Analisa Torres ordered the SEC on September 29, 2022, to produce the email speech documents, Deaton said in a Twitter thread posted on June 16.
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Deposition details
According to the lawyer, Hinman was not truthful during the deposition, believing the files would never become public. Specifically, when replying to the question whether he had “communications with anyone other than the SEC staff about the substance” of his remarks in the June 2018 speech before he gave it, Hinman said “no.”
“Hinman didn’t know the documents would be turned over. In fact, the SEC lawyer instructed Hinman NOT to answer questions because of the very privileges the Judge ultimately denied,” Deaton said.
Furthermore, as the legal expert added, “we’ve all seen the Hinman email of June 4, where he calls it the ‘Ether Speech’ and tells everyone he’s meeting with Vitalik Buterin the following week to confirm Hinman’s understanding of the Ethereum network and Ethereum Foundation.”
On top of that, Hinman had said that “with respect to Ethereum, one of the things that was somewhat compelling was it was fairly transparent,” whereas, at the same time, his agency applied a completely different approach to Ripple and the XRP token:
“In the meantime, the SEC uses Ripple’s XRP Market Reports against them to argue that they were being transparent with their XRP sales to show that they were being good stewards of XRP so investors would buy XRP.”
Finally, Deaton invited his followers to guess the two most redacted in the deposition, with the majority betting on ‘Lubin’ and ‘ConsenSys,’ referring to the Ethereum Project co-founder Joseph Lubin and the other blockchain company he founded in the Ethereum ecosystem, as well as arguing that the SEC was willing to throw Buterin under the bus.
Meanwhile, XRP, the token at the center of the lawsuit, was at press time changing hands at the price of $0.48, demonstrating an increase of 1.70% in the last 24 hours and 7.70% across the past month, despite the 9.44% drop on its weekly chart, as per data retrieved on June 16.
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