The price of the cryptocurrency XRP soared minutes after Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple, announced Wednesday morning that the Securities and Exchange Commission intended to drop a long-running lawsuit against the crypto payments company.
XRP, which is closely associated with Ripple, jumped 10% to a high of $2.55 on the news. Bitcoin rose slightly above $84,000 before dipping after the news broke. “I’m finally able to announce that this case is over,” Garlinghouse said in a video posted on X, scored to orchestral music. “It’s over.”
A spokesperson for the SEC declined to comment. The court docket for the agency’s appeals case against Ripple did not immediately show a record of the decision to drop the case.
The SEC’s legal battle with Ripple is one of its longest ongoing cases against a crypto company. In December 2020, the agency sued the crypto payments firm for selling XRP, which the SEC said was an unregistered security. Ripple fought back, and in 2023, a federal judge delivered a mixed judgement on the case, which the SEC appealed in 2024 to the Second Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals.
The regulator’s decision to drop its appeal is the latest consequential crypto case it’s abandoned since President Donald Trump took office in January.
Under former chair Gary Gensler, an appointee of President Joe Biden, the SEC argued that the vast majority of cryptocurrencies were unregulated securities, or assets like stocks and bonds that have to adhere to strict registration rules.
Crypto companies vehemently disagreed and said that decades-old securities law did not apply to a new financial asset. To force them to comply with its interpretation of the law, the SEC sued large crypto companies like the exchanges Coinbase, Kraken, and Gemini.
In response, the crypto industry launched a widespread influence campaign to elect pro-crypto politicians. Some, including the Gemini founders Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss as well as Kraken founder Jesse Powell, donated to Trump’s campaign. In total, crypto companies spent more than $130 million on pro-crypto candidates in 2024, according to crypto researcher Molly White.
After Trump’s win, Mark Uyeda, a conservative SEC commissioner, took over as acting chair. Under his watch, the SEC has restructured and cut down on its crypto enforcement unit. The agency has also launched a crypto task force to develop rules for the industry, led by pro-crypto commissioner Hester Peirce. And it’s dropped its lawsuits against and investigations of top companies, including Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and Yuga Labs.
“Our law is not supposed to be a game of gotcha,” Peirce said in a recent interview with Fortune. “Let’s just take a step back, revisit things, and get people’s input, now that people know they can come in and talk to us.”
Update, March 19, 2025: Added in that the SEC declined to comment.
