In a new letter to Analisa Torres, a United States District Court Judge for the Southern District of New York (SDNY), the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has confirmed that it has reached a settlement agreement with enterprise blockchain company Ripple.
The aforementioned letter has requested an indicative ruling from Judge Torres.
The Second Circuit previously paused the appeal to allow the parties to finalize the settlement process.
The district court would be able to formally approve the settlement once the case gets remanded, meaning that the Second Circuit would send it back to the district court.
Ripple and the SEC will be able to voluntarily drop their appeals after this.
The letter confirms that Ripple's penalty has been reduced to a mere $50 million from $125 million. The remaining sum would be returned to the company. The injunction that was imposed by Judge Torres as part of the final judgment last August will also have to be lifted.
The district would have to signal whether it would be willing to dissolve the injunction and change the penalty if the jurisdiction were to be moved from the Court of Appeals.
The parties have also agreed not to seek modification of Judge Torres's summary judgment order dating back to July 2023. The order states that programmatic XRP sales were not securities. However, Judge Torres ruled that Ripple violated the securities laws with its institutional XRP sales.
XRP is up by 7.2% over the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data.
Vladislav Sopov