$XRP: Charlie Gasparino Escalates Criticism of Judge Torres

Charles Gasparino, a seasoned journalist with a reputation for breaking major stories in finance and politics, recently turned his attention to the world of cryptocurrency. In an article for the New York Post published on 22 July 2023, Gasparino dissected the recent ruling in the SEC vs Ripple Labs case, a decision that he claims has sent shockwaves through the $1.2 trillion crypto market.

Gasparino joined FOX Business Network (FBN) in 2010 as a Senior Correspondent. According to his bio on the Fox Business website, his work has been submitted for the Pulitzer Prize and won the New York Press Club award for best continuing coverage of the Wall Street research scandal.

Gasraprino says that in 2012 Ripple introduced a cross-border payment system that uses blockchain technology to facilitate faster transactions. This system, essentially a crypto version of the SWIFT system used by banks, aimed to make money transfers cheaper and more seamless via the blockchain.

Gasparino points out that when a company like Apple sells shares, whether through a private placement, an IPO, or a secondary offering of stock, they go to the SEC and file a bunch of stuff about their operations. This is known as “disclosure,” and it’s designed to help average people who buy stocks understand what the company is up to. Gasparino points out that Ripple didn’t do this when selling all that XRP, which led to the SEC suing the company and its top executives in 2020 for damages and disclosure.

In a ruling made on 13 July 2023, Manhattan federal judge Analisa Torres declared that Ripple’s XRP sales to institutional investors were in fact securities and demanded disclosure because these were so-called investment contracts. However, she ruled that Ripple’s disclosure-free sales to small investors were acceptable. According to her logic, they were not entering into investment contracts because they purchased their XRP through an intermediary like an exchange. Gasparino claims that since these “blind” sales aren’t securities, “it’s perfectly legal for Ripple to stiff the little guy on disclosure.”

Gasparino argues that this ruling has left the crypto industry in a state of uncertainty. He suggests that Congress needs to take crypto regulation out of the hands of the judiciary as soon as possible and fix this potentially transformative business before it moves to places with more rational regulations, like China.

In his view, the crypto industry will have to live with one of the more bizarre and dangerous court rulings he’s ever seen in his three decades of covering finance.

Here is a tweet Gasparino sent out yesterday that is sure to further anger members of the XRP community, whom he has been kind of trolling ever since Judge Torres made her ruling on 13 July 2023:

Featured Image Credit: Photo / illustration by vjkombajn via Pixabay

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