With the next phase of Ripple’s XRP lawsuit only days away, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse is calling the whole affair “outrageous.”
Bradley Sostack filed a lawsuit in 2018 claiming the San Francisco-based company sold him XRP as an unregistered security. Ripple claims the allegations have no merit and argues Sostack’s claim violates the statute of limitations.
Says Garlinghouse in a new CNBC interview,
“My view of this is it’s pretty outrageous. Here’s somebody who held XRP for, I think, two weeks’ time and is making some claims. Whether or not XRP is a security is not going to be dictated by one lawsuit.
Obviously, the SEC of the United States is the governor of that, and I think it’s very clear that XRP is not a security. It exists independently of Ripple the company. If Ripple the company shut down tomorrow, the XRP ecosystem would continue to exist. It’s independent, open-source technology. From an ownership point of view, owning XRP doesn’t give you any ownership of Ripple equity. And ultimately, XRP has a lot of utility, so to me it’s quite different than what a security looks like.”
Oral arguments in the case are scheduled for January 15th. In September, Ripple filed a motion seeking to dismiss the suit. If XRP is actually a security, the company argued, federal security regulations stipulate that Stostack should have filed his claim within three years of the initial offering of XRP, which took place in 2013.
Sostack’s legal team countered by saying that the statute of limitations are invalidated by the fact that Ripple continues to sell XRP.
Ripple then shot back, saying it has “long and widely been understood that the three-year repose period runs from when a security is first offered to the public for sale.” As such, the company argued, the case should be “dismissed with prejudice” – a legal way of saying it should be dismissed permanently.
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