Stephen Diamond spoke with Protocol about the Securities Exchange Commission’s lawsuit against Ripple. The SEC has accused the crypto powerhouse of violating securities laws.

Stephen Diamond, a veteran Silicon Valley lawyer and a law professor at Santa Clara University, said Ripple essentially “took people’s fiat currency, handed people something called XRP and said the value of your XRP will go up or down depending on whether we’re successful at building out the use case for XRP.”

Distributed ledger, the core technology in crypto, he argued, “is a con game being played by crypto to evade regulation by the SEC and others.”