XRP and Ripple: Outlasted the SEC
How a 2012 ledger built by three engineers became a top-five cryptocurrency, and how a nearly five-year legal war ended with XRP's status settled.
Most cryptocurrencies were built by people who distrusted banks. XRP was built by people who wanted to sell to them. That single difference explains almost everything about it: why Wall Street firms hold it, why regulators fought it for nearly five years, why it sits near the top of the market by value while most crypto natives have never used it, and why it may end up being the digital asset that the traditional financial system adopts first.
This is the story of how it got here and what it is actually for.
Where XRP Came From
The XRP Ledger predates the company that made it famous. In early 2011, three engineers, David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb, and Arthur Britto, started building a payment ledger in response to what they saw as Bitcoin’s two structural problems: it burned enormous amounts of electricity to secure itself, and it couldn’t scale to the transaction volumes real payment systems handle. Their answer was to drop mining entirely. Instead of competing to solve puzzles, a network of independent validators would simply agree, every few seconds, on which transactions were valid. The ledger went live in June 2012.
At launch, the ledger created 100 billion units of a native asset, originally called “ripples” and given the currency code XRP. The three founders kept 20 billion and gifted 80 billion to a new company, formed in September 2012 with Chris Larsen as CEO, whose job was to build real-world uses for the asset. That company was first called NewCoin, then OpenCoin, then Ripple Labs from September 2013, and finally just Ripple from 2015. McCaleb left in 2013 and went on to co-found Stellar the following year. Larsen ran the company until Brad Garlinghouse took over as CEO in January 2017. Schwartz is still there as chief technology officer, and the XRP Ledger’s history page on xrpl.org still lists the original rationale in plain terms: the founders wanted “a more sustainable system for sending value.”
Two features of that origin story have shaped XRP ever since. First, the supply was fixed from day one; no XRP has been created since 2012, and there never will be. Second, one company started out holding 80% of it. That concentration made Ripple’s every sale a matter of public interest and, eventually, of federal litigation.
What Ripple Says XRP Is For
Ripple’s own description is worth quoting, because the company has been unusually consistent about it for over a decade. Its website calls XRP “the digital asset built for utility,” designed to “move value globally in seconds with an asset engineered for payments, liquidity, and multichain finance.” The company’s stated mission is to “build breakthrough crypto solutions for a world without economic borders.”
The utility in question is a specific one. When a bank in Japan wants to send money to a bank in Mexico, it typically needs to hold a pre-funded account in pesos on the other end, or route through a chain of correspondent banks that each take a cut and a day. Ripple’s idea was to use XRP as a bridge: convert yen to XRP, move the XRP across the ledger in a few seconds, and convert it to pesos on arrival. No pre-funding, no correspondent chain, no waiting. Ripple lists this as its first use case, “instant global payments,” and follows it with XRP as a “liquidity engine” inside the ledger’s built-in exchange, “multichain connectivity” for XRP wrapped onto other blockchains, and “enterprise tokenization” of assets like US Treasuries.
The technical claims behind that pitch are modest and verifiable. The ledger settles in three to five seconds, charges a fee of a fraction of a cent, uses negligible energy because there is no mining, and has run since 2012 with only two short outages, about ten minutes in November 2024 and about an hour in February 2025. It is open source, and anyone can build on it or run a validator. Ripple is the largest contributor to the code and the largest holder of the asset, but it does not control the network, a distinction that became central to its legal defense.
The Company Behind It
Ripple is not a crypto startup in the usual sense. It describes itself as “the leading financial technology company that offers crypto solutions for businesses,” with more than 1,000 employees, 15 offices, operations in over 90 countries, and “hundreds of customers across 50+ countries.” It has invested more than $600 million in over 70 companies since 2015. It holds more than 75 regulatory licenses worldwide, including a New York trust charter.
Its flagship product, Ripple Payments, is described on the company’s site as “a fully managed, end-to-end payments solution” that has processed more than $100 billion in volume, reaches payout markets in over 60 countries, and covers more than 90% of the global foreign exchange market. Notably, that product now moves stablecoins and fiat as well as XRP. Ripple launched its own dollar stablecoin, RLUSD, in December 2024; it passed $1 billion in circulation within a year and crossed $2 billion in August 2026, less than two years after launch, and stood near $2.5 billion by late September, with reserves attested monthly by Deloitte.
Since 2023, Ripple has spent roughly $4 billion buying the pieces of a full-service financial institution: Metaco for bank-grade custody ($250 million, 2023), Standard Custody for its New York trust license (2024), Hidden Road, a prime brokerage now called Ripple Prime that clears more than $3 trillion a year ($1.25 billion, April 2025), Rail for stablecoin payment plumbing (August 2025), GTreasury for corporate treasury software (about $1 billion, October 2025), and Palisade for XRP-native custody. In December 2025, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted conditional approval for Ripple National Trust Bank, a federally supervised trust bank that will hold RLUSD’s reserves. Garlinghouse called it “a massive step forward, setting the highest standard for stablecoin compliance with both federal and state oversight.”
Put together, that is a company that can custody assets, broker and clear them, manage corporate cash, issue a regulated dollar, and settle payments across borders, all under federal and state supervision. Very few crypto companies have built anything like it.
Who Actually Uses It
This section has a nuance in it. Ripple’s network, RippleNet, has connected more than 300 financial institutions over the years, but many of those used it for messaging and settlement software rather than for XRP itself. The set of firms that move actual XRP as a bridge asset is smaller, and it skews toward remittance-heavy corridors where pre-funding is most painful.
The anchor relationship is SBI Holdings in Japan, one of the country’s largest financial groups, whose remittance arm SBI Remit uses XRP for transfers from Japan to the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Tranglo, a Malaysia-based payments hub in which Ripple bought a 40% stake in 2021 (and reportedly sold in 2024), serves Southeast Asia and Europe. In the Gulf, Zand Bank and Mamo adopted Ripple Payments for cross-border flows in May 2025. Coins.ph in the Philippines, FINCI in Lithuania, and Xbaht on the Sweden-to-Thailand route round out a list of specialized operators rather than household-name banks. That is the pattern: the early adopters are the businesses for whom a two-day settlement delay is a direct cost.
Beyond payments, the ledger is picking up institutional tokenization work. SBI Ripple Asia issues prepaid payment tokens on it. Kyobo Life in South Korea has reportedly piloted bond tokenization on it, cutting settlement from two days to a few seconds. And with RLUSD, Ripple has given institutions a way to use the ledger without holding XRP at all, which is either a hedge or a growth strategy depending on how you look at it.
The Market Cap Question
As of mid-September 2026, XRP trades around $1.35 with a market capitalization near $85 billion, which makes it the fifth-largest cryptocurrency. About 62.9 billion XRP are in circulation out of the fixed 100 billion. It rallied hard through 2025, peaking above $3.50, before settling into a lower range this year.
Why is an asset that most retail crypto users have never transacted with worth $85 billion? Part of the answer is that XRP has spent thirteen years near the top of the market, which builds a deep base of holders and exchange listings. Part of it is that XRP’s fixed supply, low cost, and speed make it a credible candidate for exactly the settlement role Ripple has been pitching since 2012, and the market is pricing the possibility that a meaningful share of cross-border flows eventually runs through it. And part of it, in 2026, is that institutions can now buy it in a brokerage account.
Institutional Ownership
This is where XRP’s story diverges most sharply from other cryptocurrencies. The end of the SEC case in 2025 cleared the way for spot XRP exchange-traded funds, and the first of them launched in November 2025. There are now six spot funds, plus a Bitwise index fund with an XRP allocation, from issuers including Franklin Templeton, Grayscale, and Bitwise. As of early September 2026, they hold roughly $1.55 billion in assets and have taken in about $1.68 billion in cumulative net inflows, including an eleven-session inflow streak through late August and early September.
The disclosures tell you who is buying. Second-quarter 2026 filings show Goldman Sachs as the largest institutional holder of XRP ETF shares, with roughly $87 million in exposure, followed by Jane Street and Millennium Management at around $16 million each. Registered investment advisers collectively hold about $120 million, hedge funds about $25 million, brokerages about $17 million, and banks about $14 million. Those figures are gross positions and don’t capture hedges, so they overstate net conviction. But they establish something that would have been unthinkable during the litigation: one of the largest investment banks in the United States reports XRP ETF holdings to the SEC, though such positions can reflect market making rather than a directional bet.
Ripple itself remains the largest holder by far. As of late September 2026, about 32 billion XRP sit in the escrow system Ripple created in December 2017, when it locked 55 billion XRP into time-released contracts to address concerns about its ability to flood the market. Up to one billion XRP unlocks on the first of each month; Ripple typically returns 600 to 800 million of it to new escrow contracts, so net releases run in the low hundreds of millions. Add the XRP in Ripple’s operating accounts and the company controls something on the order of a third or more of the total supply. That is the single largest concentration risk in the asset, and it is also, for better or worse, the reason there is a company with a thousand employees spending billions of dollars to build demand for it.
The Legal War
For nearly five years, the most important fact about XRP was that the US government considered it an illegal security.
On December 22, 2020, the SEC sued Ripple, Garlinghouse, and Larsen, alleging that the company had raised $1.3 billion through unregistered securities offerings and that the two executives had personally sold about $600 million of XRP. Within weeks, most of the major platforms serving American customers pulled back: Coinbase suspended XRP trading effective January 19, 2021, Kraken and Bitstamp halted it for US residents, and Binance.US, Bittrex, and Crypto.com delisted it outright, with more than a dozen smaller exchanges, brokers, and market makers following. The retreat was largely an American one; Binance’s global platform and every licensed exchange in Japan, where regulators had already classified XRP as a crypto asset rather than a security, kept trading it. The price fell more than 60% in ten days, from around $0.60 before the complaint to roughly $0.20 by the end of December. Ripple, which had a war chest and a chairman with the resources to fight, chose to litigate rather than settle.
The turning point came on July 13, 2023, when Judge Analisa Torres of the Southern District of New York issued a split summary judgment. Ripple’s direct sales of XRP to institutional investors, totaling about $729 million, were unregistered securities offerings, because those buyers were plainly investing in Ripple’s efforts. But XRP sold on public exchanges through “programmatic” sales was not a security, because anonymous buyers on an exchange had no idea whether they were buying from Ripple and were not investing in a common enterprise. Most importantly, the court held that XRP, as a digital token, is not in and of itself an investment contract, so the question turns on how it is sold rather than on the token. The distinction between the asset and the manner of its sale became the foundation of every crypto legal argument since.
In October 2023, the SEC dropped its charges against Garlinghouse and Larsen personally. In August 2024, Torres ordered Ripple to pay a $125 million civil penalty, against the nearly $2 billion the SEC had sought, and enjoined it from further unregistered institutional sales. The SEC appealed, then, after the change in administrations in 2025, moved to drop the case. When the two sides tried to reduce the penalty as part of their settlement, Torres refused, ruling that they couldn’t rewrite a final judgment for convenience. On August 7, 2025, Ripple and the SEC jointly dismissed all appeals. The 2023 ruling became permanent. The next day the SEC granted Ripple a “bad actor” waiver, restoring its ability to raise capital normally.
The outcome deserves a fair reading. Ripple was found to have violated securities law in its institutional sales and paid a nine-figure penalty for it. It also won the argument that mattered: XRP is not inherently a security, exchanges could relist it, and the precedent has protected the broader industry. A company that had been treated as a pariah went on, within about a year of the case ending, to close a $1.25 billion prime brokerage acquisition, grow a Deloitte-attested stablecoin past $2 billion, secure conditional approval for a federal trust charter, and watch Goldman Sachs buy its token through an ETF. Few legal comebacks in any industry have been that complete.
A Fair Assessment
XRP’s case rests on three things that are easy to verify: a ledger that has settled payments in seconds for fourteen years with only two brief outages, a company that has built the regulated infrastructure to put that ledger in front of banks, and a legal status in the United States that is now clearer than almost any other digital asset’s.
Its open questions are equally clear. Ripple’s own product increasingly moves stablecoins rather than XRP, so the asset’s demand has to come from bridge-liquidity use, tokenization, and investment flows rather than from Ripple Payments alone. Ripple controls a third of the supply and sells some of it every month, which is a structural headwind that only diminishes as the escrow runs down over the next decade. And the corridor partners are, so far, specialized remittance firms rather than the global banks the 2017 narrative promised.
But the direction of travel is unmistakable. The regulatory cloud is gone. The ETFs exist and are attracting the kind of buyers who don’t buy things on a whim. The company has conditional approval for a federal trust bank, a Deloitte-attested dollar, and a $3 trillion clearing business. XRP was built to be the crypto asset the financial system could actually use, and in 2026, for the first time, the financial system is showing up.
A Note on This Article
This article is provided for general informational and educational purposes only. It is not financial, investment, legal, or tax advice, and nothing in it should be read as a recommendation to buy, sell, hold, or use XRP, any product offered by Ripple, or any other digital asset. The figures, dates, and descriptions above were drawn from publicly available sources, including Ripple’s and the XRP Ledger’s own published materials, believed to be reliable at the time of writing, but markets and companies change quickly and the author makes no representation or warranty as to the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of any of it. References to specific companies, products, executives, or institutions are for illustration and commentary only and do not constitute an endorsement or a criticism of any of them; every opinion expressed here is the author’s alone. Readers should not rely on this article in making any financial decision. Cryptocurrency carries real risk, including the risk of total loss, and anyone considering it should conduct their own independent research, review the relevant companies’ current disclosures directly, and consult a qualified professional before acting. Crypto Highlander and its author accept no liability for any loss or damage arising from the use of, or reliance on, the information contained here.