Ripple CEO claims the SEC is a bully ‘trying to regulate through enforcement’

As the legal battle between Ripple and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) drags on, the blockchain company’s chief executive officer has more scathing criticism for the regulator.

Specifically, Ripple’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse believes that the SEC can be characterized as being a “bully” that is trying to “regulate through enforcement” in his interview with the CNBC Crypto World’s MacKenzie Sigalos published on September 23.

Bullying crypto companies into submission?

In the interview, the Ripple CEO highlighted that 95% of his company’s growth was from customers outside the U.S. “partly because the rules of the road are clear in those countries,” as well as because of the SEC’s regulation practices:

“The SEC is trying to regulate through enforcement. That’s a super inefficient way to do this, as opposed to ‘let’s do the work, let’s provide the clarity.’”

Furthermore, Garlinghouse referred to the SEC as being a bully, forcing cryptocurrency companies to simply give up as they can’t afford to waste money on lawsuits that require a lot of time:

“I would characterize the SEC has built a reputation I think it deserves as being a bully. Many players that the SEC has gone after simply have to fold their cards.”

He also reminded of the fact that Ripple has already “spent over $100 million defending ourselves in a case that we have tried to move forward as quickly as we can and the SEC has gone as slowly as they can.”

As an example of the SEC intentionally dragging the case, Garlinghouse mentioned the fact that the judge has ordered the regulator five times in the last 18 months to turn over the notes from an earlier case in which the SEC claimed Ethereum (ETH) was not a security.

“The judge is ordering the SEC to turn these notes over and they won’t do it and they keep coming up with new reasons why; so much so that the judge in her most recent ruling said the SEC is being hypocritical and (…) ‘not following a faithful allegiance to the law.”

‘Not protecting investors’

According to the Ripple CEO, “these are damning words for an agency whose mission is stated as to protect investors. In the case of the Ripple lawsuit, they destroyed $15 billion of value in the XRP market when they filed the lawsuit. That was not protecting investors.”

The SEC is suing Ripple over claims it was issuing the XRP tokens illegally, as the regulator sees them as securities. Recently, Ripple has filed a motion to dismiss, claiming that the tokens can’t be securities due to the lack of an “investment contract” giving investors rights or obliging the issuer to act in their interest, as Finbold reported.