Court Orders Ripple to Pay $125M Penalty, Ripple Declares Victory for "Industry and the Rule of Law"

Ripple Hit With $125 Million Penalty, Fraction of SEC Claim

Ripple Labs Inc. was ordered by a federal judge to pay a civil penalty of $125 million for improperly selling its XRP token to institutional investors, a fraction of what US regulators had sought in a long legal battle with the cryptocurrency company.

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The agency had sought almost $2 billion in penalties, while Ripple said it shouldn’t have to pay more than $10 million. In her ruling Wednesday, US District Judge Analisa Torres noted that the case didn’t include any claims of fraud.

XRP rose as much as 25% to 64 cents after the ruling. Still, the token, which is the seventh-largest cryptocurrency by market value, is little changed this year. The order comes as digital currencies have lost value amid the current bout of risk aversion in global markets.

Opinion | Crypto is no haven from market volatility

Then came Monday. As if to put the final nail in the coffin, as if to bury once and for all any hopes of using cryptocurrencies as “digital gold,” bitcoin dropped by 15 percent. This is not how a hedge against inflation or disaster acts. As Bloomberg News’s Joe Weisenthal put it, it behaved more like “3 tech stocks in a trenchcoat.” If that’s what you want, why not just buy the tech stocks?

What, then, is crypto good for? Possibly it can help people evade currency controls that prevent them from moving their wealth out of the country — though this will work only as long as people in places such as the United States and Europe remain willing to trade valuable local currency, or goods and services, in exchange for crypto. Certainly, it seems to be useful for collecting ransomware payouts.

But beyond this, it seems less like digital gold than a digital slot machine. I can’t shake the feeling that most people use it not because it’s a good substitute for anything they need, but because it’s fun to watch the reels spin without knowing whether they’ll pay off. In other words, bitcoin’s not good for much of anything except giving people who have money to burn a novel way to set it on fire.

Brazilian Civil Police Dismantles Crypto Laundering Scheme Employed by Drug Gang

The Civil Police of São Paulo, Brazil, dismantled a money laundering scheme managed by the drug gang First Capital Command (PCC) that operated a company operating as a crypto exchange, the police said on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday.

The company conducted transactions worth approximately 500 million reais ($89 million), according to a CNN report. During the raid, the police seized checks worth 55 million reais ($8.9 million) at the company’s headquarters, whose name was not released at this time.

Trader Convicted in First US Crypto Manipulation Case Moves for Acquittal

The first person criminally convicted of cryptocurrency market manipulation filed a motion asking a federal district court in Manhattan to vacate the jury verdict and grant a new trial.

Sanford Talkin, a partner at Talkin, Muccigrosso & Roberts, is among the lawyers for the defendant, trader Avraham Eisenberg, who claimed the prosecution by the U.S. Department of Justice “suffered from a series of fundamental flaws, both legal and evidentiary,” on its conviction of commodities fraud, commodities manipulation and wire fraud.

SEC Charges Founder-Owners of Urban Commons LLC with Orchestrating Two Securities Fraud Schemes

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged Taylor Woods and Howard Wu, the co-founders and co-owners of Urban Commons, LLC, with securities fraud involving two schemes to defraud two sets of investors related to investments in and ownership of thirteen hotels in the United States, including the historic Queen Mary. The two schemes resulted in over $70 million in investor losses.

According to the SEC’s complaint, in the first scheme, Woods and Wu fraudulently induced investors to sell their equity interests in the hotels to an entity Woods and Wu secretly controlled and would later use as part of a transaction, which Woods and Wu concealed from the investors, to publicly list the hotels in an overseas real estate investment trust (REIT)….

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In a second scheme, perpetrated in 2021 after the REIT had filed for bankruptcy, the complaint alleges that Woods and Wu raised at least $1.775 million from a second set of investors to purchase the same hotels out of bankruptcy….