Judge rejected SEC and Ripple’s bid to rewrite the final judgment

U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres rejected a joint request from the Securities and Exchange Commission and Ripple Labs on June 26, 2025, refusing to signal that she would dissolve Ripple’s permanent injunction and reduce its $125,035,150 civil penalty to $50 million.

The order blocked the settlement structure the parties had negotiated, but it did not end the litigation. Their appeals remained pending in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on June 26. Torres said they could withdraw those appeals if they wanted the case to end, or continue appealing the judgment if they wanted the court’s orders changed.

The proposed settlement failed its court test

The SEC and Ripple had signed a settlement agreement on May 8, 2025. Its operation depended on the district court indicating that, if jurisdiction returned from the appellate court, it would dissolve the injunction entered on August 7, 2024 and release the escrowed penalty. Under the proposal, $50 million would go to the SEC and the balance would return to Ripple. The parties would then seek a limited remand and dismiss their appeals.

Torres denied an initial request on May 15 because the parties had not addressed the legal standard for changing a final judgment. Their renewed motion invoked Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 62.1 and 60(b)(6). The June 26 order denied that second attempt on the merits.

The judge concluded that the parties had not shown exceptional circumstances sufficient to outweigh the public interest and the administration of justice. She emphasized that a court judgment is not simply the property of the litigants and rejected the premise that a private agreement, standing alone, justified eliminating the injunction or cutting the penalty by 60%.

What remained in force

The August 7, 2024 final judgment had permanently enjoined Ripple from violating Section 5’s registration requirements and imposed the $125,035,150 penalty. That judgment followed the court’s July 13, 2023 summary-judgment ruling, which found that Ripple’s XRP sales to certain institutional buyers were unregistered offers and sales of investment contracts.

The same 2023 decision treated other transactions differently. It found that Ripple’s programmatic sales on digital-asset exchanges did not, on the record before the court, establish buyers’ reasonable expectation of profits from Ripple’s efforts. The June 26 order did not revisit those transaction-specific conclusions, decide that XRP was categorically a security or categorically not a security, or create a rule for other tokens.

That distinction mattered beyond Ripple. The SEC had described the proposed resolution as part of a changing regulatory approach to crypto, while expressly saying the settlement was not based on a reassessment of the case’s merits and did not necessarily state its position in other cases. Torres accepted that an agency may change policy, but held that the shift did not erase the standards governing relief from a final judgment.

What was known on June 26

The verified development was therefore narrower than claims that the case was over: the district court refused the negotiated route to a lower penalty and removal of the injunction. Reuters reported on June 26 that Ripple had not decided its next legal step and that the SEC had no immediate comment. No market-return claim is made here; XRP traded continuously across venues, and the cited records do not provide a defined exchange, instrument and measurement window capable of isolating the order’s effect.

Later procedural context

On August 7, 2025, the SEC and Ripple jointly dismissed their appeal and cross-appeal. The SEC then confirmed that the $125,035,150 penalty and injunction remained in effect. That later outcome clarifies the procedural endpoint; it was not knowable from the June 26 order itself.