Ripple ordered by Judge to produce over 1 million Slack messages to SEC

After an apparent data mistake, Ripple is now forced to provide terabytes of Slack communications that were previously unsent to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)

With respect to the agreement in place, U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn has ordered Ripple to turn over one million missing Slack communications between workers.

The judge insisted on the communications being sent to the SEC due to their critical and unique nature as evidence. This in spite of Ripple’s complaint that this would cost them up to $1 million to carry out.

It was on December 20 that the SEC filed suit against Ripple Labs, Christian Larsen, and Bradley Garlinghouse, the company’s first and current CEOs, for marketing XRP as an unregistered security.

The SEC stated in their original motion from August 9th that Ripple employees’ messages were “relevant to the parties’ claims and defenses and proportional to the needs of the case”. On top of that, it added that in addition to the Slack messages, Ripple should also send all emails from 22 email custodians.

The SEC informed Judge Netburn last month that Ripple’s Slack messages seemed to be incomplete. As a consequence of an alleged data processing error, Ripple first rejected this assertion, but then clarified that the firm only produced a tiny number of relevant messages, and that more than one million messages were missing.

That, according to the SEC, was “highly prejudiced” considering that the messages the SEC had obtained indicated that the remaining Slack recordings would be extremely important.

“These messages include: (a) discussions about Ripple’s desire to create speculative trading in XRP, (b) the effect of Ripple announcements and efforts on, and Ripple’s concerns as to, the price of XRP, the relationship and central importance of XRP sales to Ripple’s overall business, and (d) the regulatory status of XRP.”

“Any burden to Ripple is outweighed by its previous agreement to produce the relevant Slack messages, the relative resources of the parties, and the amount in controversy,” Judge Netburn said.

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