Prices of XRP and XLM have been in the spotlight on Wednesday, with the two altcoins leading a posse of altcoins out of a price quagmire of the past five days, rising by double-digits and outperforming still-sluggish Bitcoin and Ether. Blockchain-based payment platform Stellar Lumens’ XLM was recently trading above 15 cents, up 18% over the past 24 hours, while Ripple’s XRP, the third largest crypto by market capitalization, was recently changing hands above 82 cents, up 6.8% from Tuesday.
In short, we’re seeing a return of investors that had previously been spooked by recent regulatory measures, said Markus Levin, co-founder of XYO Network. The recent U.S. federal court decision, which established that XRP token sales on exchanges and through algorithms did not constitute investment contracts, has spurred a number of exchanges such as Coinbase, Kraken, and Bitstamp to relist XRP, leading to a jump in investments, trading volumes, and open interest for futures contracts.
Preston Byrne, a partner at the law firm Brown Rudnick, told journalists TV’s First Mover program on Wednesday that the U.S. federal court’s decision last Thursday may have offered Ripple a partial win in its ongoing court case against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), but the ruling failed to clarify fundamental issues that would allow Ripple and other crypto organizations with tokens to operate on more solid ground.
The problem isn’t that the decision provides certainty for Ripple in this particular litigation, Byrne said. The reason there’s uncertainty is because this court has now ruled differently than everyone expected it to, based on 70-80 years of precedent. He added that the U.S. Congress should create regulation that considers the unique characteristics of crypto, such as its self-sovereign nature, and that people spend it in applications which provide useful software.