Photo credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg

Analisa Torres, the Judge of the United States District Court Southern District of New York, has imposed a civil penalty of $125 million and has given a final judgment, legally prohibiting Ripple Labs, a provider of digital asset infrastructure for financial services, from making future unregistered XRP sales.  

In the court filing on Aug.7, the US court — after their independent analysis of Ripples’ expert report — found the company’s 1,278 unregistered XRP (XRP) sales violated Section 5 of the Securities Act of 1933. 

Initially, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sought a final judgment in its lawsuit against Ripple, which included a permanent injunction to prevent future violations, as well as nearly $1.9 billion in total penalties, encompassing disgorgement, prejudgement interest, and a civil penalty. 

However, based on the court's decision, the civil penalty has been reduced by approximately 93.6% from the initial remedy requested by the SEC.

Sharing the latest developments from the ongoing case, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse announced:

“This is a victory for Ripple, the [crypto] industry and the rule of law. The SEC’s headwinds against the whole of the XRP community are gone.”

Following the order, XRP spiked more than 18.9% in the 24-hour time frame, according to CoinGecko. At 4:00 p.m. UTC on Aug. 7, XRP’s green candlestick closed at $0.5339 although it started from $0.4999. 

Four hours later, at 8:00 p.m. UTC, XRP’s candlestick broke beyond the upper Bollinger Bands, closing the trade at $0.6006. One of the reasons behind XRP’s sudden spike is due to high incoming volume in the market.

Santiment, a market on-chain analytics platform, had also reported that XRP’s market cap had skyrocketed by 23%. The analytics platform also noticed that wallets holding between 1 million to 10 million coins on XRP Ledger hold an all-time high of $4.42 billion worth of XRP (approximately 7.06 billion XRP). 

The latest Ripple versus SEC update created confidence in the community as XRP’s social media discussion reached their highest level since January, as per the report by Santiment.