Attorney and XRP supporter John Deaton plans to hop in the middle of another lawsuit against San Francisco payments company Ripple Labs.
Deaton plans to file motion that would enable him to submit amicus brief in the lawsuit Zakinov v. Ripple Labs in California.
The case is the consolidation of two separate legal disputes, the first of which is a class-action lawsuit from lead plaintiff Bradley Sostack, a former XRP investor who claims Ripple illegally sold XRP as an unregistered security and violated advertising laws in California.
In 2020, Sostack’s lawsuit, which was initially filed in 2018, merged with a separate case filed by Bitcoin Manipulation Abatement (BMA), a company based in the US territory of Puerto Rico, which also claims that Ripple violated securities laws by selling XRP.
Deaton plans to argue that the court should side against the plaintiffs because many XRP holders believe the asset is not a security, and because the lawsuit isn’t limited to direct XRP sales from Ripple.
Says the attorney,
“Whether it’s the SEC or a plaintiff’s attorney making the absurd argument that secondary market transactions of a token are also securities simply because it may have been previously offered or sold in a way that violated Section 5 of the Securities Act, I’ll see you in court.”
Deaton has played an active role in the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) ongoing lawsuit against Ripple, filing an amicus brief on behalf of XRP supporters in opposition to the regulator’s motion for summary judgment.
The SEC sued Ripple in late 2020 for allegedly selling XRP as an unregistered security.
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