Although Ripple has scored a monumental victory in the blockchain company’s legal standoff with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) when Judge Analisa Torres ruled that the XRP token was not a security, the XRP community still awaits the final judgment before it can move away from the lawsuit.
Specifically, as the court found, Ripple Labs did not violate federal securities law by selling its XRP token to retail investors on public cryptocurrency exchanges. However, the SEC did score a partial win for itself, as the judge ruled that the XRP sales to sophisticated investors did, in fact, constitute securities sales.
One potential outcome of the final judgment is that both parties reach an agreement and settle the case. In a different scenario, in which the parties fail to reach a settlement, the case could go to trial. On the other hand, either party appealing the case is a possibility as well.
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Until presidential election?
In particular, legal experts stand divided on the regulator’s next course of action – whether the SEC would appeal Judge Torres’s decision and try to reverse the conclusion that XRP is not a security or settle with Ripple and turn to a different front from which it could attack the crypto industry, such as the crypto trading platform Coinbase.
If the SEC pursues an appeal under the direction of chief Gary Gensler, it could suffer an even worse loss, including in terms of finances, and Ripple could drag the initial appeal out until the next presidential election or beyond, after which Gensler would likely be gone, as the higher courts prefer not to rule on issues partially, and typically wait until there is a final judgment.
Furthermore, as legal expert Jeremy Hogan argues:
“If [the SEC] wins the appeal, it pulls back some adverse trial-level case. But if it LOSES at the appellate level, now every Court in the 2nd [District Court of Appeal (DCA)] MUST follow the decision. They could literally turn a mole-hill into a mountain.”
Indeed, should the regulations watchdog realize this is not worth its efforts, it might decide to settle, in which case the XRP community could put the whole ordeal behind it much sooner. Either way, a favorable outcome for Ripple would mean an increase in the price of XRP, as it happened following Judge Torres’s decision.
XRP price predictions
At press time, XRP was changing hands at the price of $0.714, increasing 0.21% in the last 24 hours, recording a 7.77% decline across the previous seven days, and capturing a significant gain of 51.09% on its monthly chart, according to the recent information retrieved on July 28.
Meanwhile, Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) tool Bard has listed several potential price predictions for XRP after Ripple’s legal triumph, including reaching an average price of $1.30 by the end of 2023, as well as more conservative predictions of $0.47 or $0.71 by the year’s turn.
By comparison, the machine learning algorithm deployed by the crypto forecast platform PricePredictions projected XRP to trade at $0.71 at the end of August 2023, suggesting a slight downswing over the next 30 days. Earlier, crypto analyst CoinsKid shared an opinion that XRP could hit the $6 price by the end of 2023.
More recently, crypto market expert Cryptoinsightsuk listed five potential price outcomes for the XRP token post-SEC case, including a mini bull run to $10-$15, a similar smaller pump, a further pump to $20-$30, a complete moon mission, or double tapping the highs of 2017 and reaching $3.30-$3.60, as Finbold reported on July 21.
Disclaimer: The content on this site should not be considered investment advice. Investing is speculative. When investing, your capital is at risk.
