“XRP Army” is believed to have supported the spillover incident against the SEC

For a long time, the XRP military has claimed it is more than a crowd of noisy retailers.

Now, as Ripple’s four-year battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission has been shut down, both the judge and Ripple’s lawyers say they made a difference.

Crypto attorney John Deaton, who filed an Amicus brief on behalf of the owner, said in a post on X on Wednesday that anyone denying his role “will either know the facts and truths or are intentionally lying.”

Judge Annalisa Torres cited the debate she made in Deaton’s submission, XRP holder affidavit and even another Lbry case when she determined that XRP itself was not security.

“If she hadn’t cited them, people could legally debate whether our efforts would make a real difference, but the evidence lies in the decision itself,” Deaton said.

Executives within Ripple agree. Deborah McCrimmon, assistant adviser to Ripple, told Penta Podcast on Monday that the unpaid XRP Army research was invaluable. Ripple relies on “fair notification” defenses, claiming that the SEC has failed to clarify how cryptography is applied.

“We were looking for speeches, talks, what the SEC or government said by the Blockchain, Crypto, XRP, Ripple and XRP forces mined it for us,” McCrimmon said. “I could have paid my lawyer thousands of dollars to do that, but they’d found it and posted it on Twitter.”

The SEC sued Ripple in 2020, accusing him of raising funds through unregistered securities sales. The case was dragged out for years and became a litmus test of how regulators handle secondary sales of crypto tokens.

In July 2023, Judge Torres determined that XRP’s sale on the exchange was not eligible for securities, but the sales at some institutions were. The mixed decision gave Ripple the breathing chamber, but stopped a complete victory.

The legal battle officially ended in August when both parties appealed. By then, XRP had already delivered some of the wildest swings of years to traders. The token surged 72% after the 2023 ruling, jumping from $0.47 to $0.81. This July, it fell to an all-time high of $3.65.

XRP is nearly $2.85, down almost 1% over the past 24 hours.