Nat Whitaker

Sitting on a train on my way to visit @FoxBusiness and the great @cvpayne, for his 2 pm show. I’ve been listening to many decipher the ruling. One thing I can say is confirmation bias is a real thing. We all suffer from it, including me. But I remember very clearly when the Ripple Complaint was filed. Unlike many others, I maintained from the beginning that it was a weak Complaint as long as YOU IGNORE THE NOISE contained in the Complaint. But many people, who rightly or wrongly dislike Ripple, and think they’re “bad” for the ecosystem, focused too much on the noise. The SEC used fraud-like language in a non-fraud case. They did it to inflame people within the industry. It was a Divide & Conquer strategy. For example, the Compalint asserted @bgarlinghouse said he was very long XRP but sold some of his XRP. So what! If you’re being paid in XRP as part of your compensation of course you’re going to sell some of it. If you have a billion XRP and sell 100 million, you’re still very long XRP. But people get blinded by the noise and then confirmation bias kicks in so people argued Ripple’s going to lose because XRP is clearly a security. In the meantime, they ignored the grossly overboard and made-up theory the SEC was arguing. The SEC argued all past, present and future sales of XRP were ALL securities transactions. When I read that I was like is the SEC insane to try and extend Howey in perpetuity from earlier transactions and efforts (the original scheme, contract or transaction). The Complaint even extended into future hypotheticals. It stated even if a foreign country adopted or recognized XRP as a currency in the future it will only be because of Ripple’s efforts and will still constitute a security. That’s absolutely insane. Yet, people were like Ripple dumped on retail and did this and did that. My point was then limit the damn allegations to only include Ripple sales. But if this theory isn’t challenged it could apply to all tokens. When I sued the SEC I was called the pro-Ripple lawyer. Some even said “he must be being paid by Ripple.” 🤦‍♂️ The SEC called me a disgruntled investor who’s mad that he picked the wrong token. Yet, I owned 10X more in Bitcoin than XRP. I owned 3 or 4X more in ETH than XRP at the time. This case as always been about the law and fighting gross overreach. There isn’t a case in history where an investment contract was found when no privity existed between the buyer and issuer/promoter. There isn’t a case in history the SEC could cite that found a second sale of an investment contract to also be an investment contract. There wasn’t a case in history in an investment contract transaction that found the underlying asset itself to be the security. There wasn’t a case in history that the SEC could cite that found the underlying asset “embodied” all the efforts of the promoter and therefore the asset itself “represents” the investment contract. SEC enforcement lawyers were making this shit up as the case progressed. For ex, the common enterprise was first Ripple. Ripple got them to admit XRP holders aren’t entitled to anything from Ripple. Then the SEC relied on a hack of an expert who claimed the common enterprise was the entire XRP ecosystem including exchanges and every XRP holder in the world and testified that XRP holders had to rely on Ripple (even though he didn’t interview a single holder). We helped get that clown’s opinion excluded and then the SEC argued XRP - the token itself - represented the common enterprise. The judge smacked that all down and simply applied Howey to each type of sale. The law won. The SEC lost.

Thanks again to one of the best in the business: @cvpayne.

I could not say no to an invitation after Coinbase did exactly what @iampaulgrewal said it would when he was on Crypto-Law. He said Coinbase would not hesitate to relist XRP for trading if the decision allowed it. Within hours of the decision , XRP was trading. 👏