The US Securities and Exchange Commission and Ripple Labs have asked the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to keep their dueling appeals on ice while they continue to persuade the trial judge that a hard-fought, four-and-a-half-year legal war should end in a $50 million settlement and the lifting of an injunction against the San-Francisco-based payments company.
Ripple And SEC Push For Final Deal
In an eight-page status report filed late Monday, the Commission told the appellate panel that “the parties had reached an agreement-in-principle, subject to Commission approval, to resolve the underlying case and the appeals” and therefore “respectfully request[ed] that this Court continue to hold the appeals in abeyance” until the next update is due on 15 August 2025.
The filing recaps a rapid-fire sequence that began after both sides signed a settlement agreement on 8 May. Under that pact, Ripple would pay $50 million—barely 40 percent of the $125 million civil penalty imposed last year—while the remainder of the escrowed funds and accrued interest would be returned to the company.
The deal is contingent on US District Judge Analisa Torres dissolving the permanent injunction she entered on 7 August 2024 and ordering release of the escrow. “If the district court issues the requested indicative ruling,” the status report explains, the parties will seek a limited remand so that the trial court can rewrite its judgment and, once that is done, both the SEC’s appeal and Ripple’s cross-appeal “will [be] dismiss[ed].”
Judge Torres initially balked. On 15 May she rejected the first indicative-ruling motion because it failed to grapple with Federal Rule 60(b)’s “exceptional circumstances” standard. The adversaries returned on 12 June with a 52-page memorandum arguing that continued litigation would waste judicial resources, that vacating the injunction is a “necessary condition of settlement,” and that the SEC’s own policy pivot toward negotiated crypto resolutions after Acting Chair Mark T. Uyeda’s January crypto task force announcement reinforces the equities of ending the fight.
The Commission’s new tone contrasts sharply with its posture under former Chair Gary Gensler, whose enforcement-first strategy produced the December 2020 complaint and—after a bruising discovery battle—a split summary-judgment ruling on 13 July 2023. Judge Torres held that Ripple’s $728.9 million in direct institutional XRP sales were unregistered securities offerings, but that programmatic exchange sales and other distributions were not.
The final judgment that followed in August 2024 locked in the $125 million penalty and the injunction while ordering Ripple to park 111 percent of the fine in an interest-bearing escrow account. Both sides appealed in October 2024; the SEC’s opening brief landed on 15 January 2025, but before Ripple’s response was due the parties jointly asked the Second Circuit on 10 April to pause the case in light of their nascent settlement. The court granted that request on 16 April.
What has changed since then, the renewed motion argues, is a confluence of factors courts have long recognized as “exceptional”: a comprehensive settlement conditioned on modifying final relief, the SEC’s publicly stated recalibration of crypto enforcement, and the absence of any non-party prejudice because the underlying summary-judgment opinion would remain intact. The memorandum cites recent voluntary dismissals of other high-profile crypto cases as evidence that “terminat[ing] the appeals … would be consistent with [the] dismissals by joint stipulation.”
Whether Judge Torres will be persuaded this time is the critical open question. If she signals a willingness to dissolve the injunction and slash the penalty, a limited remand from the Second Circuit would follow almost automatically. If she demurs, the appeals—now fully briefed only on the SEC’s side—could roar back to life.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.247.
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