SEC Seeks ‘Terabytes’ of Slack Messaging Data from Ripple

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has filed a motion to obtain a court order for accessing the chat history of Ripple’s employees over the messaging platform, Slack. According to the regulator, the messages, ‘comprising of terabytes of data’, are critical evidence in its case against the blockchain company.

As revealed by attorney James Filan on Twitter, the SEC has filed an emergency motion on Monday, requesting Judge Sarah Netbrun of the Southern District of New York to grant the order. 

#XRPCommunity #SECGov v. #Ripple #XRP BREAKING: SEC files emergency motion for a discovery conference regarding Slack communications. Seeks order compelling Ripple to search and produce relevant communications between Ripple employees on Slack.https://t.co/AQ8Av1igoV

— James K. Filan 🇺🇸🇮🇪 (@FilanLaw) August 9, 2021

Ripple requested an extension on its deadline until August 16 for replying to the SEC’s motion.

Interestingly, the blockchain firm already handed over some of its internal communications to the regulatory agency and earlier agreed to hand over Slack communications, but suddenly refused.

“Ripple agreed at the outset of discovery to search for and produce responsive Slack data but now, in the waning days of fact discovery, suddenly refuses to do so on the basis of Ripple’s mistakes in gathering that data,” SEC’s motion stated.

Terabytes of Data

It further elaborated that Ripple admitted that the communication data left out by Slack is of a ‘massive quantity’ and only a small fraction was provided to the prosecutors because of processing error.

“Ripple now refuses to search the full set of Slack messages for any of the 33 custodians whose records the parties agreed to search and produce, other than the Individual Defendants,” the motion added.

According to the SEC, Ripple’s data error and refusal to produce most documents has ‘already been highly prejudicial’.

Earlier, the SEC sought access to Ripple’s legal communications and on the personal financial transactional history of its executives, but those motions were denied.

Meanwhile, Ripple recently received the court’s approval to question a former high-level SEC official who played a key role in defining the status of cryptocurrencies. According to Ripple, it wants to understand the policy-making process of the agency.