The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is appealing a previous ruling in its case against Ripple, according to a court filing on Wednesday. "We believe that the district court decision in the Ripple matter conflicts with decades of Supreme Court precedent and securities laws and look forward to making our case to the Second Circuit," an SEC spokesperson told The Block.
The SEC initially sued Ripple in 2020, accusing the firm of raising over $1.3 billion through unregistered securities sales. In August, District Judge Analisa Torres ordered Ripple to pay a $125 million civil penalty, significantly lower than the SEC's original $2 billion demand, partially granting the agency's motion for remedies regarding Ripple's sale of XRP.
In July 2023, the same judge ruled that while Ripple's secondary market sales of XRP did not violate securities laws, direct XRP sales to institutional investors constituted securities investment contracts. Following the appeal, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse criticized the agency, asserting that XRP's non-security status is already law. "Somehow, they still haven't gotten the message: they lost on everything that matters. Ripple, the crypto industry and the rule of law have already prevailed," Garlinghouse said.
Starting next year, Swift announced that banks in North America, Europe, and Asia will begin live trials of digital asset and currency transactions over its global messaging network. Swift has previously experimented with blockchain transactions, including collaborations with web3 services firm Chainlink.
The experiments demonstrated Swift's ability to provide a single point of access to multiple public and private blockchain networks, which could support institutions in creating tokenized assets and developing central bank digital currencies. However, next year's trials mark the first time Swift will move beyond experimenting with blockchain transactions to real-world settlement.
Binance Labs has invested an undisclosed sum in Sophon, a ZKsync "elastic chain" Layer 2 network built using Matter Labs' ZK Stack. This investment comes ahead of the mainnet and SOPH token deployment next month. The investment brings Sophon's total funding to over $70 million.
Crypto asset manager Grayscale has launched a new fund called the Grayscale Aave Trust, offering accredited investors exposure to the governance token AAVE. However, the fund is only available to eligible individual and institutional accredited investors through a private placement.
Decentralized exchange Aerodrome Finance has exceeded $1 billion in deposits, representing more than half of the total value locked on the Ethereum Layer 2 network Base. Aerodrome dominates Base in both total value locked and trading volume.
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