The legal battle between the United States Securities Exchange Commission (SEC and blockchain-based payments firm Ripple continues, with the regulator wanting further access to Ripple'due south internal communications.

The SEC filed a motion with the Southern Commune of New York on Mon, requesting Estimate Sarah Netbrun to order Ripple to produce and submit its employee messaging on business organization communication platform Slack.

The filing notes that Ripple's previous production of Slack messages to the SEC was incomplete, with the firm eventually admitting that this was caused due to a "data processing mistake" subsequently "repeatedly contending that its Slack production was complete." The SEC believes that Ripple only collected a small portion of its Slack messages and that a "massive quantity" of Slack data has not been collected or searched.

"Ripple's information error and refusal to produce most documents has already been highly prejudicial to the SEC. Amid other things, the SEC has deposed 11 Ripple witnesses using incomplete records of their communications," the filing added.

According to the SEC, the missing documents include over 1 million messages comprising "terabytes of information" and eclipsing Ripple's big email productions, which corroborates testimony that Ripple employees communicated at least as often by Slack as past email. The authority emphasized that previous Slack letters shared past Ripple "have yielded critically important information" that wasn't part of emails or other documents provided by the firm.

Ripple after filed a request to extend the borderline to respond to the SEC'due south motion regarding the Slack communications from Thursday, Aug. 12, to Monday, Aug. sixteen.

Related: Ripple granted access to Binance'southward records in SEC securities case

Attorney Jeremy Hogan, a pop lawyer within the XRP customs, suggested that the SEC's latest motion is even so another effort to prove that XRP should be treated as a security and thus fall under the commission'due south jurisdiction. "It is attacking from the flank and arguing Ripple marketed and treated XRP like a security and therefore it is. The SEC has had some success with this argument in the past and it makes sense every bit a strategy since in all substantive ways XRP is Not like a security," Hogan noted.

Concluding week, SEC Chair Gary Gensler called for increased regulations to adopt rules for decentralized crypto exchanges. In response, quondam Commodity Futures Trading Committee Chair Christopher Giancarlo argued that crypto regulation doesn't fall nether the SEC's jurisdiction, equally cryptocurrencies are commodities.