Brad Garlinghouse accuses former SEC chair of hypocrisy

CEO Ripple Brad Garlinghouse criticised former SEC chair Jay Clayton’s remarks on the agency’s approach to regulating the industry.

Watching this clip makes my blood boil.

The hypocrisy is shocking. @CNBC @SquawkCNBC should be calling him out for the bullshit.

(As a reminder, jay clayton brought the case against ripple, me and Chris Larsen. And left the building the next day).

— Brad Garlinghouse (@bgarlinghouse) October 28, 2023

Garlinghouse left a comment under a post by Gemini co-founder Cameron Winklevoss on June 28. At the time, Clayton, on CNBC, expressed the view that the SEC should bring lawsuits against specific companies only when there are solid grounds for doing so.

«Watching this clip makes my blood boil. The hypocrisy is shocking,» wrote the head of Ripple.

He noted that the SEC filed a suit against him, the fintech company, and co-founder Chris Larsen under Clayton. The next day the official resigned.

On June 13, 2023, the company secured a partial victory in the case. Judge Analisa Torres ruled that programmatic sales and other token distributions do not constitute the sale of investment contracts. However, according to the court’s ruling, the sale of XRP to institutional participants in the industry violated securities laws.

The SEC attempted to challenge the court’s ruling, but Torres denied the agency’s interlocutory appeal. She found that the Commission had not provided enough evidence, and the arguments presented would not significantly advance the final resolution of the case.

In October the regulator withdrew the suit against Larsen and Garlinghouse on securities-law violations. At the same time, Ripple’s chief legal officer Stuart Alderoty noted that this marked the SEC’s third defeat in the litigation, with no victories.

In June, the Commission filed suits against the Bitcoin exchanges Binance and Coinbase.

Earlier, US Representative Warren Davidson urged the removal of the regulator’s current head Gary Gensler from his post due to the mishandling of the Grayscale case. He had previously suffered a partial defeat in the Ripple case against Ripple.

Later, media accused the SEC chairman of turning the agency into a “banana republic”.