Ripple Labs and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have jointly requested a pause in their respective appeals to finalize a potential settlement, per a motion filed on Thursday.

The filing signals a possible end to a high-profile dispute that has gripped the payments upstart industry since December 2020 for its sale of XRP tokens, which the SEC alleged were unregistered securities.

The case has been a focal point for debates over the regulatory status of cryptocurrencies in the United States, with Ripple arguing that XRP is a currency, not a security, and thus outside the SEC’s jurisdiction.

Ripple and the SEC have reached an “agreement in principle” to resolve all outstanding issues, per a post shared by attorney James Filan.

This includes not only the SEC’s appeal of the district court’s final judgment but also Ripple’s cross-appeal and the claims against Ripple founders Brad Garlinghouse and Chris Larsen.

The motion requests that the court hold the appeals process in abeyance — effectively pausing it — while the parties hammer out the final terms of the settlement, which still requires formal approval from the SEC’s commissioners.

This follows a similar request from the SEC and Gemini in early April, where the two parties requested the court approve a two-month pause to finalize a deal to close their long-running legal dispute over Gemini’s Earn program.

U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is under fire from Senate Democrats following his recent decision to narrow the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) crypto enforcement priorities and disband its crypto enforcement squad.

In a Thursday letter to Blanche, six Senate Democrats — Sens. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I), Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) — blasted his decision to cut the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET) as “giv[ing] a free pass to cryptocurrency money launderers.”

The Senators called Blanche’s directive that DOJ staff no longer pursue cases against crypto exchanges, mixers or offline wallets “for the acts of their end users” or bring criminal charges for regulatory violations in cases involving crypto, including violations of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA), “nonsensical.”

“By abdicating DOJ’s responsibility to enforce federal criminal law when violations involve digital assets, you are suggesting that virtual currency exchanges, mixers, and other entities dealing in digital assets need not fulfill their [anti-money laundering/countering the financing of terrorism] obligations, creating a systemic vulnerability in the digital assets sector,” the lawmakers wrote. “Drug traffickers, terrorists, fraudsters, and adversaries will exploit this vulnerability on a large scale.”

In his memo to DOJ staff on Monday evening, Blanche cited U.S. President Donald Trump’s January executive order on crypto, which promised to bring regulatory clarity to the crypto industry, as the reason for his decision.

“The Department of Justice is not a digital assets regulator,” Blanche wrote, adding that the agency will “no longer pursue litigation or enforcement actions that have the effect of superimposing regulatory frameworks on digital assets while President Trump’s actual regulators do this work outside the punitive criminal justice framework.”

Instead, Blanche urged DOJ staff to focus their enforcement efforts on prosecuting criminals who use “victimize digital asset investors” or those who use crypto in the furtherance of other criminal schemes, like organized crime, gang financing, and terrorism.

Read more: DOJ Axes Crypto Unit As Trump’s Regulatory Pullback Continues

For the Senate Democrats, however, Blanche’s claim doesn’t quite cut the mustard.

“You claim in your memo that DOJ will continue to prosecute those who use cryptocurrencies to perpetrate crimes. But allowing the entities that enable these crimes — such as cryptocurrency kiosk operators — to operate outside the federal regulatory framework without fear of prosecution will only result in more Americans being exploited,” the lawmakers wrote.

The lawmakers urged Blanche to reconsider his decision to dismantle NCET, calling it a “critical resource for state and local law enforcement who often lack the technical knowledge and skill to investigate cryptocurrency related crimes.”

New York Attorney General Letitia James raised similar concerns in her own letter to Congress on Thursday, urging lawmakers to pass federal legislation to regulate the crypto markets. Though her letter itself made no mention of Blanche’s memo or the shuttering of NCET, a press release from her office highlighted that her letter “comes after the [DOJ] announced the dismantling of federal criminal cryptocurrency fraud enforcement, making a robust regulatory framework all the more critical.”

With a signature from President Donald Trump, the decentralized financial (DeFi) corner of the crypto sector is now freed from U.S. Internal Revenue Service demands that such platforms be treated as brokers and required to track and report user activity.

That narrowly focused IRS rule, approved in the final days of former President Joe Biden’s administration, has been formally struck down, according to Representative Mike Carey, an Ohio Republican who backed the effort. And the agency is prevented from pursuing anything like it, according to the Congressional Review Act power used by lawmakers to get rid of the tax regulation.

Though the issue was relatively limited, its completion marks the first time a pro-crypto effort has cleared the U.S. Congress.

Both the Senate and House of Representatives agreed to reverse the IRS action with strong bipartisan showings, further underlining the crypto sector’s strength in this Congress. That could bode well for the industry’s chances with other more wide-ranging matters, including legislation to regulate stablecoin issuers and to set market rules for crypto transactions.

Trump’s signature on the DeFi tax resolution puts that concern for DeFi in the rearview. The next crypto priority in Congress has been stablecoin legislation. Similar bills have passed relevant committees in both the House and Senate and are awaiting floor votes in each chamber. Approvals would start a process to meld the two efforts into one compromise version.

The president has called for a bill to arrive on his desk by August, and the lawmakers behind the legislation have said such a timeline is still possible.