Court Denies SEC Request to Appeal Ripple Labs Decision Before Trial

SEC Bid for Quick Appeal of Ripple Labs Crypto Ruling Is Denied by Judge

The federal judge who ruled that Ripple Labs Inc.’s cryptocurrency doesn’t constitute a security when sold to the general public denied the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s request to appeal the determination before trial.

US District Judge Analisa Torres on Tuesday ruled against the regulator in a case it filed against Ripple in Manhattan federal court. A trial is scheduled for April.

The SEC needed Torres’s permission to appeal her ruling because it wasn’t a final judgment. The regulator was also seeking to put on hold its suit against Ripple for allegedly offering unregistered securities while the appeal is pending.

The First Day of the SBF Trial Was Like Crypto Prom

“I’ve never seen the courthouse like this.”

So muttered an experienced member of the press just before 8 a.m. on Tuesday as we stood outside the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse, where the trial of fallen crypto titan Sam Bankman-Fried was set to begin….

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As some other writers remarked, the SBF trial felt like the first day of school. While waiting to access the media overflow room, I spotted practically anyone and everyone who’s had something to say about decentralized currency over the last few years. There was Zeke Faux, the Bloomberg investigative reporter and SBF interviewer who’d recently published his first book, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall; there was Tiffany Fong, the YouTuber and crypto-fraud exposer who’d earned SBF’s ear; there was Laura Shin, the pioneering crypto journalist and founder of the Unchained media network. (And hey! There was Slate contributor and Ben McKenzie collaborator Jacob Silverman.)

SEC Coinbase Case: Regulator Doubles Down on Claims Against Crypto Exchange

The Securities and Exchange Commission is pushing ahead with its litigation against Coinbase Global Inc., raising the stakes further in the case against the biggest US crypto exchange. T

The SEC on Tuesday asked a federal judge to reject Coinbase’s attempts to have the agency’s lawsuit tossed. The company had argued that the watchdog “abused its discretion” in claiming that the firm was offering crypto products that were unregistered securities.

Sam Bankman-Fried Sues His Insurer as Legal Bills Mount and Fraud Trial Begins

Crypto tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried has sued his insurance provider, CNA, for allegedly failing to pay legal costs linked to his defense against fraud allegations.

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CNA, also known as the Continental Casualty Company, has “unjustifiably failed to make timely payment on Mr. Bankman-Fried’s claims as required by the Policy,” said the filing, adding that those alleged breaches “have caused, and threaten to cause, substantial and irreparable harm to Mr. Bankman-Fried for which there is no adequate remedy at law.”

Capital One data stolen by analyst in $3.1 million insider trading scheme

A foreign national who previously lived in Henrico pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiracy and insider trading.

Nan Huang, 44, conspired with his then-coworker to commit insider trading, according to court records. From 2008 to 2015, Huang worked as a senior data analyst for a subsidiary of Capital One Financial Corporation. As a senior data analyst, Huang had access to a Capital One database that collected transaction data from Capital One credit card and debit card customers.

In violation of his fiduciary duties to Capital One, Huang searched the database thousands of times and compiled on his work computer material, nonpublic information about publicly traded companies. Because this information was highly correlated with the not-yet-public actual revenue of these companies, Huang was able to predict whether these companies would meet their revenue expectations.

New York, California See Trillions in Assets Flee to Wall Street South

The drip, drip, drip of the finance industry’s exit from New York and California has been measured anecdotally, one at a time, these past few years. Elliott Management decamped to West Palm Beach. AllianceBernstein to Nashville. Charles Schwab moved to suburban Dallas.

Now, for the first time, there are hard numbers quantifying the exact scope of the exodus. Both states have in the past three years lost firms that managed close to $1 trillion of assets, Bloomberg News calculated after going through corporate filings from more than 17,000 firms since the end of 2019.

SEC: Whistleblowers

D.E. Shaw paid $10 million. I hope somebody is getting a whistleblower payment for this? Maybe the easiest lucrative job in finance is:

1. Take a job at a hedge fund.

2. Get handed an employment agreement on the first day that says “you agree not to disclose any of our secrets unless required by law.”

3. Sign.

4. Take the agreement home with you.

5. Circle that sentence in red marker, write “$$$$$!!!!!” next to it and send it to the SEC.

6. The SEC extracts a $10 million fine.

7. They give you $3 million.

8. You can keep your job! Why not; it’s illegal to retaliate against whistleblowers.

9. Or, you know, get a new one and do it again.

U.S. Crypto Regulation Irrelevant to Sam Bankman-Fried FTX Allegations, DOJ Says in Fraud Trial Arguments

“While the existence of a law might be relevant to establish a statutory duty of care, the absence of regulation is not relevant to whether money was, in fact, entrusted to the defendant’s care by his victims,” the DOJ filing said, adding that the existing criminal rulebook is sufficient. “There are prohibitions on misappropriating customer assets – they are the very laws that the defendant has been charged for violating.”

Prosecutors also dismissed Bankman-Fried’s arguments that pooling and reallocating customer funds was common in the crypto industry at the time, saying that legal argument only worked if he believed the practice was lawful.

SPAC Drought Hits Milestone With Zero US Offerings Since August

It had been over a year since the market went a month without a SPAC debut. That ended in September.

The once-hot market for blank checks where dozens were pricing each month just two years ago has gone cold as investors sour on the back-door listing vehicle and the appetite for riskier assets disappears over economic fears of higher-for-longer interest rates. The last special-purpose acquisition company to debut on a US exchange was 99 Acquisition Group Inc., which raised $75 million on Aug. 17, making it the longest stretch without a new listing since at least July 2022, data analyzed by Bloomberg show.