What if you had been waiting years to get judicial clarity on a vital legal issue, only to receive contradictory rulings on that issue from two different judges in the same court just weeks apart? This ironic outcome is precisely what befell the crypto industry this past July in two high-profile challenges to SEC enforcement actions regarding sales of well-known crypto tokens.

In mid-July 2023, the crypto industry finally saw at least some judicial success in its long-running debate with SEC enforcement authorities over whether federal securities laws applied to sales of crypto tokens. In a mixed decision in SEC v. Ripple Labs, 2023 WL 4507900 (S.D.N.Y. July 13, 2023) (Torres, J.), the court held that the securities laws applied to some, but not all, sales of Ripple's XRP token.