Three years ago, on July 13, 2023, Judge Analisa Torres delivered a summary judgment in SEC v. Ripple that fundamentally altered the regulatory landscape for digital assets. The court ruled that XRP itself is not a security and that Ripple’s programmatic sales on public exchanges did not constitute securities transactions. This landmark decision immediately triggered a 70% single-day price surge for XRP and prompted major exchanges such as Coinbase, Kraken, and Gemini to relist the token after having suspended trading following the SEC’s lawsuit. The court, however, found that Ripple’s $728 million in direct institutional XRP sales qualified as unregistered securities offerings, creating a critical legal distinction that continues to influence crypto regulation nationwide.
Behind the scenes, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and CTO David Schwartz later revealed the company nearly ceased operations during the lawsuit due to immense legal pressure. In the years since, Ripple has transformed its business, launching the dollar-backed stablecoin RLUSD in December 2024 and expanding partnerships with Onafriq, Axelar Foundation, Clear Junction, Archax, OpenEden, BDACS, and Ctrl Alt to support cross-border payments, tokenized real-world assets, and interoperability on the XRP Ledger. The company acquired Standard Custody & Trust Company to bolster compliance and, in April 2025, purchased prime broker Hidden Road for $1.25 billion, embedding RLUSD and the XRP Ledger into institutional post-trade infrastructure.
The Torres ruling also paved the way for spot XRP exchange-traded funds (ETFs), with funds from Bitwise, Franklin Templeton, Grayscale, and others launching in late 2025. These ETFs have dominated crypto flows, though July 2026 recorded a modest $2.5 million outflow after nine consecutive weeks of inflows. XRP, which surged past $3 in early 2025 and hit a new all-time high in July of that year, now trades above $1 on the ruling’s third anniversary—emblematic of its journey from a delisted, litigation-burdened token to a maturing institutional asset.
