Ripple Lawyer Critical of SEC Push to Regulate Crypto

The general counsel for Ripple, which provides cryptocurrency and other blockchain-related services for businesses, said in an article published Monday (June 13) that the Securities and Exchange Commission is trying to destroy the crypto industry.

“By bringing enforcement actions — or threats of potential enforcement — the SEC intends to bully, bulldoze, and bankrupt crypto innovation in the U.S., all in the name of impermissibly expanding its own jurisdictional limits,” Stu Alderoty said in the piece he penned for Fortune Magazine.

Ripple has been engaged in a lengthy legal battle with the SEC, which alleges the company inappropriately used Ripple’s token to raise funds for the company without properly registering the business with the agency.

Ripple has argued during the case that a top SEC official acknowledged that other cryptocurrencies, and Ripple by extension, are sufficiently decentralized to avoid being classified as securities. The SEC argued back that the executive was sharing his own, not the agency’s, opinion, according to news site Cointelegraph.

Alderoty called the agency “misguided” for bringing its case against Ripple.

“The SEC hasn’t really articulated its theory, but whatever it is, it’s a stretch,” Alderoty, in his article, said of critics who argue that the crypto industry is dangerous and reckless.

“The U.S. is not the ‘Wild West’ due to existing anti-fraud and anti-money laundering laws. Yet without a comprehensive regulatory framework, the U.S. will continue to fall further behind other responsible global economic centers,” he wrote.

Cryptocurrency has indeed found critics within the SEC. Chairman Gary Gensler today repeated his warnings that the crypto world is full of high-risk investments and that crypto tokens fit the category of assets that must be sold by registered entities.

Read more: SEC’s Gensler Says Most Crypto ‘Likely to Fail’ 

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