New petition asks SEC chair nominee Gary Gensler to drop Ripple lawsuit

The Ripple community has launched a new petition to “stop the war” on XRP.

Crypto & Policy founder Thomas Hodge has started a Change.org petition directed at Securities and Exchange Commission chair nominee Gary Gensler, asking him to end the SEC’s lawsuit against Ripple once he’s confirmed as chairman of the commission.

Announcing the news Wednesday, Crypto & Policy called on Gensler to investigate the potential motives of former SEC chair Jay Clayton and his SEC Director of Corporate Finance William Hinman for “favoring” Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) while harming XRP. The petition alleges that Clayton and Hinman could have had financial interests in Bitcoin and Ether:

“While Clayton and Hinman were in office, they were asked if Bitcoin and Ether were securities. They said very clearly, on the record: no they are not securities so keep trading them. They both took money from companies with direct or clear indirect interest in those public statements.”

Hodge further alleged that Hinman “received millions of dollars in payments” from the law firm of Simpson Thacher, which is a member of the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance. The petition claims that Hinman “collected checks from the firm” while the firm earned fees supporting the initial public offering of Chinese crypto mining giant Canaan.

The XRP advocate outlined the uncertain regulatory status of the altcoin, stating that Clayton spent four years of his tenure without providing a clear response on whether XRP was a security. Hodge continued:

“But on his final day in office, Clayton had his SEC file a massive lawsuit against Ripple, claiming it had sold XRP as an illegal unregistered security for seven years. [...] The SEC alleged that Ripple and all holders of XRP should have known for the last seven years that XRP was a security when the SEC itself repeatedly said it didn’t know it until the day it filed the lawsuit in December 2020.”

At the time of writing, the online petition has collected about 1,600 signatures.

As previously reported by Cointelegraph, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Ripple Labs, as well as its CEO Brad Garlinghouse and co-founder Christian Larsen on Dec. 22, 2020, alleging that XRP was a “$1.3 billion unregistered securities offering.”

Amid the ongoing legal battle, a U.S. court granted Ripple Labs access to the SEC’s documents on defining crypto assets as securities in early April. 

Earlier this week, the price of XRP crossed the $1 mark for the first time since March 2018. The latest price milestone is still far from its all-time high of above $3 recorded in January 2018.