The legal battle between the United states of america 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 Monday, requesting Gauge Sarah Netbrun to club Ripple to produce and submit its employee messaging on business 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 fault" after "repeatedly contending that its Slack production was consummate." The SEC believes that Ripple but collected a small-scale portion of its Slack messages and that a "massive quantity" of Slack data has not been collected or searched.

"Ripple's data error and refusal to produce about documents has already been highly prejudicial to the SEC. Amongst other things, the SEC has deposed eleven Ripple witnesses using incomplete records of their communications," the filing added.

According to the SEC, the missing documents include over one meg messages comprising "terabytes of data" and eclipsing Ripple'south large 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 by Ripple "have yielded critically important information" that wasn't part of emails or other documents provided by the business firm.

Ripple subsequently filed a request to extend the deadline to respond to the SEC'due south motion regarding the Slack communications from Thursday, Aug. 12, to Mon, Aug. 16.

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

Attorney Jeremy Hogan, a pop lawyer inside the XRP customs, suggested that the SEC's latest movement is notwithstanding another endeavor to prove that XRP should be treated equally a security and thus fall under the commission'south jurisdiction. "It is attacking from the flank and arguing Ripple marketed and treated XRP like a security and therefore information technology is. The SEC has had some success with this statement in the past and it makes sense as a strategy since in all substantive ways XRP is NOT similar a security," Hogan noted.

Last calendar week, SEC Chair Gary Gensler called for increased regulations to adopt rules for decentralized crypto exchanges. In response, one-time Article Futures Trading Commission Chair Christopher Giancarlo argued that crypto regulation doesn't fall under the SEC's jurisdiction, as cryptocurrencies are commodities.