- Judge Torres denies Ripple and SEC request to lift injunction, retaining XRP institutional sale restrictions and $75m penalty.
- Ripple and SEC sought to cut civil penalty by sixty percent but failed to show the exceptional circumstances.
The legal battle between Ripple and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has reached another crossroads. Judge Analisa Torres denied a joint request to lift an injunction that bars Ripple from certain XRP sales. The decision keeps in place a court order that followed a 2023 ruling on institutional token offerings.
On Thursday, Judge Torres wrote that nothing about the case has changed. She noted that Ripple and the SEC now ask to cut the civil penalty from $75 million to $30 million and remove the permanent bar on specific sales. However, she said neither side proved “exceptional circumstances” to override the original judgment.
The dispute began in late 2020, when the SEC accused Ripple of raising $1.3 billion through XRP sales without registration. In July 2023, the court found that programmatic sales—those made under a blind bid process—did not violate securities laws. Yet direct institutional sales did fall under those laws, leaving Ripple facing a $125 million fine.
Since then, Ripple has pressed to end the case. In March, CEO Brad Garlinghouse said the company had essentially won after the SEC dropped its appeal. Meanwhile, the agency launched a crypto task force and revised its approach to digital assets under new leadership.
“But the parties do not have the authority to agree not to be bound by a court’s final judgment that a party violated an Act of Congress in such a manner that a permanent injunction and a civil penalty were necessary to prevent that party from violating the law again,” Judge Torres said. “For that, the parties must show exceptional circumstances that outweigh the public interest or the administration of justice. They have not come close to doing so here.”
Still, Judge Torres emphasized that parties cannot simply agree to ignore a court’s final judgment. Therefore, she refused to vacate the injunction or slash the penalty. She added that Ripple and the SEC may withdraw their appeal or pursue it further.
Ripple’s Chief Legal Officer, Stuart Alderoty, responded on X:
“The ball is back in our court. We can either dismiss our appeal on historic institutional sales or press forward. Either way, XRP’s status as not a security remains unchanged.”
XRP (Ripple) is trading at $2.11, reflecting a -3.58% price decline in the last 24 hours and a -2.30% loss over the past 7 days.
Despite this short-term pullback, XRP remains one of the top-performing large-cap assets on a 12-month basis, with a 349% annual gain, and currently holds the #4 position by market capitalization, valued at approximately $124.4 billion.
Trading volume remains high at over $2.42 billion in the past 24 hours, suggesting continued speculative and institutional interest.
