Charges against Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and executive chair Chris Larsen have been dropped by the SEC, and the regulator also faced an unfavorable ruling in the case concerning retail XRP sales.

Lawyer Bill Morgan, closely monitoring the Ripple lawsuit, has expressed the view that the United States Securities and Exchange Commission has a very slim chance of winning its appeal against Ripple.

According to Morgan

There is no apparent appellable error except in favor of Ripple concerning ODL sales that do not meet at least two prongs of the Howey test. He estimated the SEC’s chances of success in an appeal against Ripple to be as low as 3%.

Bill Morgan’s prediction was in response to statistics shared by prominent attorney Jeremy Hogan, who provided government data on the success rate of appeals in various types of lawsuits. According to the data, the SEC has a 14.2% chance of winning the appeal against Ripple.

Ripple endured a protracted legal battle with the SEC that spanned three years before a judge ultimately ruled that the sale of XRP on cryptocurrency exchanges did not constitute a violation of securities law. This judgment marked a significant victory for Ripple, which had suffered substantial business setbacks during the SEC lawsuit in the United States, as several major cryptocurrency exchanges had delisted XRP from their platforms.

Additionally, the SEC’s attempt to appeal this judgment faced another setback. On October 4, Judge Analisa Torres ruled that the regulatory agency had failed to demonstrate the existence of controlling legal questions or substantial grounds for differences of opinion regarding the initial ruling.

Ripple’s chief legal officer, Stuart Alderoty, characterized the SEC’s move as “a surrender,” while Ripple, in its official statement, referred to it as a “stunning capitulation.”

Bill Morgan pointed out that with the SEC dismissing the rest of the case, there will be no trial in the coming year. He also predicted that the court might issue a “final judgment, probably sometime next year.”