SEC Drops Lawsuit Against Ripple, XRP Price Surges: What’s Next?

The SEC has dropped their appeal against Ripple, launching XRP price of over 13%+ to $2.53 as Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse congratulates his team.

The news comes as the SEC’s Crypto Task Force led by Hester Peirce vows to de-regulate the cryptocurrency industry in the US to allow innovation and experimentation to thrive. 

With the SEC withdrawing their appeal, Ripple will no longer officially be called a security by regulators, opening new doors for the XRP token in a pro-crypto US.

SEC drops appeal against Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse celebrates

the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will revoke their case against Ripple after Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty call for celebrations.

Since December 2020, Ripple has been in a battle with the SEC after the Securities Commission dubbed XRP a security and not a commodity. Since Gary Gensler’s outing and Trump taking office, crypto policy has shifted.

President Trump vowed to make the US the crypto capital of the world. To do this, de-regulation across the US crypto industry has taken place with the SEC dropping cases against Robinhood, Tron, Consensus, Coinbase, and Gemini exchange.

Announcing the news, Brad Garlinghouse posted a video on Twitter/X, explaining the situation and congratulating the Ripple team. For Garlinghouse, a long battle has been won and it’s time for the crypto community to put tribalism aside. 

According to Brad Galringhouse, “we won then on every critical legal point, proving the digital asset XRP was not a security” and that by law, the XRP token will be known legally as a commodity.

Garlinghouse has praised Trump’s new leadership and their response to tackling regulation in the cryptocurrency industry, bringing new inventors and developments back to the US after many companies threatened to leave the States during Gensler’s reign over the SEC. 

What will happen to XRP?

Now that the case is on its way out, XRP will have newfound freedoms as a crypto asset in a pro-crypto nation with multiple ETFs already filed and waiting to gain approval.

Multiple investment firms including Greyscale Investments and 21Shares have filed for Ripple XRP ETFs with the SEC. 

Many analysts expected that once Ripple’s case with the SEC was over, the market would see the release of XRP ETFs into traditional markets, possibly making XRP the largest altcoin ETF alongside Ethereum. 

With the case now dropped, XRP has become one of the most compliant crypto tokens in the industry. The industry could see an XRP ETF approval very soon, at least within 2025 along with Solana, Hedera Hashgraph, and Litecoin, according to Eric Balchunas.

For Ripple, with no pending lawsuits against them and the SEC now working on their side, we may see greater implementation of Ripple’s cross-border payments system in the US.

Most recently, Ripple payments have been used to facilitate cheap, instant payments between Brazil and Portugal. Ripple also received a payments license in the United Arab Emirates.

How did the SEC’s case against XRP end?

According to FOX Businesses’s Eleanor Terrett, the SEC’s case against Ripple was due to end some time ago around the beginning of 2025/late 2024, but Ripple’s legal team bargained for a better deal.

Sources believed that Ripple’s legal team wanted Judge Torres’s $125 million fine to be rescinded. Although there is no news yet of the fine being dropped, those sources were made public 7 days before the SEC dropped their case publicly. 

Reports indicated that the SEC is in the process of wiping their crypto investigations clean and starting over with new regulations that allow growth in the industry. 

In time, more will be revealed about what happened behind closed doors between the SEC and Ripple, possibly after March 21 when the Crypto Task Force is due to discuss crypto regulations.