The regulator continues to insist that the legal status of Bitcoin and Ethereum is unrelated to the Ripple case.
In a letter to Magistrate Sarah Netburn, US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) senior attorney Mark Sylvester asked the court not to force the SEC to provide additional answers to Ripple’s inquiries.
The SEC accuses the defendants of trying to “entrap” them to answer questions about the legal status of Bitcoin and Ethereum, pointing out that it has never filed a sanction lawsuit against the two cryptocurrencies:
It is undisputed that the SEC has never filed a enforcement action against Bitcoin or ETH issuers who claim to have transacted securities during these transactions.
The SEC says it typically doesn’t make independent decisions about whether certain financial instruments are securities.
Missing Answers
Plaintiffs typically rely on argumentation inquiries to determine whether opponents’ claims are supported by the facts. On August 31, Ripple’s lawyers filed a lawsuit to compel the plaintiff to answer inquiries that defined the regulator’s theory about how the Howey Test could be applied to all transactions made by executives over the course of eight years.
In the aforementioned petition, the defendants claimed that the institution refused to provide the information sought in various inquiries. In particular, all the terms of the contract that allegedly gave rise to an expectation of profit could not be determined:
“The SEC should not be allowed to play cat-and-mouse on this issue.”
The SEC also did not respond to whether Bitcoin and Ethereum claimed to be securities within the meaning of Section 2 of the 1993 Securities Exchange Act because it believes the legal status of the aforementioned cryptocurrencies is irrelevant to the case.
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