Judge Analisa Torres is again being asked to reopen her own final judgment in the XRP lawsuit between Ripple Labs and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Yet in the corridors of crypto law the real debate is not procedural, but psychological: will the judge indulge the parties’ second-try joint motion, or will she signal—again—that settlement must occur on her terms rather than theirs? Two outside lawyers who know the record as well as anyone, Bill Morgan and Fred Rispoli, have laid out starkly different expectations.
Will Judge Torres Kill The XRP Deal Again?
Morgan, a pro-Ripple Australian solicitor whose X threads often go viral among XRP holders, cautions that timing alone could betray the court’s mood. “It only took seven days for Judge Torres to reject the last joint motion to modify the judgment to reduce the fine and dissolve the injunction. Less than seven days to decide the current joint motion may not be the best sign she will grant it,” he wrote on 15 June, warning an impatient community not to mistake speed for sympathy.
Despite that warning, Morgan sees a substantive hook the judge could grab if she wishes to end the four-year dispute: “The strongest argument in the joint motion is that the modification of the final orders of Judge Torres is a necessary condition of the settlement agreement between the SEC and Ripple, and that if the final orders are modified by reducing the amount of the fine and dissolving the injunction, the litigation will finally be at an end and court resources will be saved as this will bring an end to the appeal and cross-appeal.”
Even so, Morgan’s endorsement is hardly unqualified. He reminds readers that the parties themselves chose to hinge settlement on rewriting the judgment: “They could have simply agreed to end the appeal and the cross-appeal and lived with and moved on from the final orders… Ripple wanted more. The parties are really imposing a fait accompli on the court and hoping the Judge exercises her discretion… Intuitively, I think she will grant the motion but it would not surprise at all if she does not.”
Rispoli, a US litigator who has represented individual XRP holders but not Ripple itself, reads the joint filing far more bleakly. “I don’t like this filing based on how obvious it was from Judge Torres’ last ruling that she was pissed,” he posted on 12 June. Rispoli faulted the motion for brevity where contrition was needed: “I recommended a long, detailed motion explaining the SEC’s failures in crypto regulation (with Commissioner declarations) and some apologies from Ripple for what it got tagged on. Instead, we got one paragraph on the other SEC dismissals and a paltry mention of the SEC Crypto Task Force. Oof.”
For Rispoli, the dispositive issue is judicial discretion, not black-letter law. He concedes that “the parties cite enough law for the court to grant it,” yet concludes, “I don’t think this gets it done, sadly.” His prediction is grim: unless the parties supplement the record or Judge Torres decides she simply wants the case off her docket, the motion could meet the same fate as its predecessor. He nevertheless notes that a continued injunction is “not a death knell—Ripple can still sell XRP to institutions, just not in the same way it did pre-2018,” though more conservative counterparties would likely remain on the sidelines.
Taken together, the two analyses produce an unusually narrow probability band: Morgan’s guarded optimism tempered by procedural unease collides with Rispoli’s skepticism that any judge, once “pissed,” will bend twice. What both agree on is that the court now faces a binary choice whose commercial impact is outsized: either ratify a $50 million penalty with no injunction and end all appeals, or send the question back to the Second Circuit for another year of briefing and, perhaps, an eventual merits ruling that neither side wants.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.25.
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