Last week was the Paris Blockchain Week, and the epicenter of crypto policy and regulatory conversation moved to the French capital accordingly. Cointelegraph reported extensively from the ground and ran a series of interviews with some of the crypto industry’s captains who shared their thoughts on the state of regulatory affairs. For one, Binance’s Changpeng Zhao said that he was excited to see regulators embracing financial innovation and introducing crypto-friendly policies, calling it a major trend of 2022. Bertrand Perez, chief operating officer of the Web3 Foundation, opined that many policymakers, including some in the European Union, still tend to act too fast on crypto regulation without getting properly educated on the subject first. Ripple’s Brad Garlinghouse even filled in the Blockchain Week crowd on the latest developments in the company’s court struggle against the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, which indeed saw some upside for the issuer of Ripple’s XRP.
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse was looking happy in Paris. He told an audience at the Paris Blockchain Week that Ripple’s court battle with the SEC “has gone exceedingly well and much better than I could have hoped when it began about 15 months ago.” The cause for Garlinghouse’s jubilation was a decision by Judge Sarah Netburn concerning documents relating to a speech made by William Hinman in 2018, when he was director of the SEC Division of Corporation Finance. Hinman said at that time that Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) are not securities. The SEC held during the Ripple trial that the speech reflected Hinman’s personal views and not agency policy. Then, the agency argued that Hinman’s speech reflected Ripple’s policies and not Hinman’s personal views, and so it wanted them shielded through deliberative process privilege (DPP) protection. The judge wrote, “Having insisted that it [the speech] reflected Hinman’s personal views, the SEC cannot now reject its own position.” What the SEC can do is appeal that decision within two weeks.
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