The ongoing legal battle between the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and Ripple has taken on new development as of late. To provide some context, the SEC had accused Ripple’s XRP token of displaying security-like functions, to which Ripple had responded by saying that their token is not, in fact, security, and so the allegations were baseless. The SEC, however, stated that Ripple had been given multiple warnings before the lawsuit had been made official. Now though, the SEC has stated that Ripple’s XRP token does not even behave like BTC or ETH, thus providing all the more reason for additional suspicion and scrutiny.
In the latest development, the SEC is now saying that the XRP token is extremely different than both Bitcoin and Ethereum. In the most recent hearing regarding the case, not only had the SEC accused Ripple of the illegal and unsanctioned selling of unauthorized securities under the guise of their XRP token but now Jorge Tenreiro, the legal counsel, has also accused that token of being very dissimilar Bitcoin and Ethereum, two of the biggest crypto assets today.
Tenreiro then went on to respond to Ripple’s lawyers by claiming that, under their own admission, Ripple does not act like Bitcoin due to it functioning as a single entity that has created the assets and that this is a fundamental difference.
Ripple has been unable to demonstrate whether XRP has any real utility
The accusations by Tenreiro didn’t stop as he went on to state that the XRP token has yet to demonstrate any real or quantifiable utility as of this time, despite Ripple’s lawyers consistently trying to find a use case. Ripple, in turn, has responded by saying that XRP does, in fact, have a use case, and it can be helpful. They went on to explain that as XRP is purely digital, banks do not have to keep their respective fiat accounts on either specific end, in addition to being able to deploy this money in a much more effective and efficient way elsewhere. XRP may then be utilized as a sort of bridge currency, therefore having utility.