The question of whether XRP is a security has been a topic of debate for years.
While the SEC claimed in its lawsuit that XRP was a security, Judge Analisa Torres of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York made a dual distinction in her decision.
The court said Ripple's institutional sales constituted an unregistered securities offering, but sales to retail investors on cryptocurrency exchanges were not securities.
Finally, after the SEC's move to withdraw the Ripple case, experts stated that the doubts about XRP being a security were removed, while the IMF indirectly argued that XRP is a security in a recent report.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) released the first update of its Balance of Payments and International Investment Guidelines since 2009 last week, and cryptocurrencies were added to the framework.
The IMF’s new Balance of Payments Manual (BPM7) classifies crypto assets according to whether they impose a financial claim or liability on the issuer, while generally suggesting that altcoins are debt-bearing securities.
While the IMF argues that Bitcoin does not pose a liability due to its mining process, it argues that utility tokens, commonly known as altcoins, do pose a liability.
After the IMF made this distinction, some users commented, “XRP is about to be permanently listed as a security.”
Following these comments, Ripple CTO David Schwartz claimed that XRP does not fit this definition of a utility token, but if it does, Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) would also fall into this definition.
“If XRP is a utility token that you can use to pay future transaction fees, or a security according to the IMF, then so are BTC and ETH.”
*This is not investment advice.
