Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, speaks at the 2022 Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., May 4, 2022.
Mike Blake | Reuters
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s years-long crusade against the crypto industry appears to be over.
The final chapter closed on Wednesday, when Ripple announced that the SEC had officially dropped its four-year-old lawsuit against the company. The suit, filed on Jay Clayton’s last day as SEC chair, accused Ripple of raising $1.3 billion through the sale of its XRP token without registering it as a security.
Crypto companies and exchanges Coinbase, Kraken, Robinhood, Binance, and OpenSea all previously saw lawsuits or investigations dropped, resolved or put on hold. Ripple is now taking a victory lap.
“Ripple stands alone as the company that fought back — and won on essential legal questions — throwing a major wrench into the SEC’s plans to destroy crypto in the U.S. through enforcement,” Ripple Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty told CNBC in an emailed statement. “The SEC has now abandoned its appeal in our case. In a fitting irony, Ripple was the first major case they brought and will now be the last one they walk away from.”
XRP was created in 2012 as one of the first non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies. It was started by the founders of the company Ripple, and became the platform’s native currency. Like bitcoin, XRP can be bought and sold by retail investors. XRP jumped about 11% after Wednesday’s announcement.
Ripple spent $150 million battling the government in a bruising legal standoff with former SEC Chair Gary Gensler, whose approach to crypto was widely viewed as hostile. In July 2023, a federal judge ruled that XRP is “not necessarily a security on its face,” undercutting the foundation of the SEC’s case.
The win wasn’t just a turning point for Ripple. It signaled to the crypto industry that the tide was turning, and built momentum for a movement that helped return President Donald Trump, a former crypto critic, to the White House. A year after the judge’s ruling, Trump, as Republican nominee, delivered a keynote at the annual Bitcoin Conference, and announced that he was “laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.”
Ripple and its crypto peers were major contributors to Trump’s campaign. The president has spent his first two months in office paying them back.
New leadership
On Friday, the SEC hosted its first major crypto roundtable, signaling a new approach of regulation through engagement, rather than enforcement. Leading the effort is Hester Peirce, who is helming the regulator’s newly established Crypto Task Force.
Peirce’s message to the industry is that the SEC is no longer an adversary, but is instead trying to give crypto a clear, lawful framework.
In a major policy reversal, the SEC rescinded Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 — a controversial rule that required banks to treat crypto assets as liabilities on their balance sheets. Introduced in 2022 and championed by Gensler, the rule was widely viewed as a major barrier to institutional adoption of bitcoin and other digital assets.
“Bye, bye SAB 121! It’s not been fun,” Peirce wrote on in a post on X after the change was announced in January.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that month, CEOs from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America signaled that the thaw in Washington could lead to renewed crypto engagement.
U.S. President Donald Trump sits next to Crypto czar David Sacks at the White House Crypto Summit at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 7, 2025.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
And at the White House, David Sacks, Trump’s AI and crypto czar, stood beside the president as he signed an executive order on digital assets. Sacks had recently attended the Crypto Ball as part of the inauguration, where he declared, “The war on crypto is over.”
Coinbase’s lawsuit was dismissed in February. Then came Kraken. The SEC pulled back from its Wells Notice against Robinhood’s crypto division. The investigation into Binance is on hold.
Ripple’s legal team long argued that the SEC’s strategy wasn’t about upholding the law, but about using it as a blunt instrument. The regulator sent subpoenas to foreign regulators that worked with Ripple, demanded troves of documents from business partners and even sued CEO Brad Garlinghouse and co-founder Chris Larsen personally. Those charges have also been dropped.
“While this chapter is closed, the fight for clear, fair, and transparent crypto regulation continues,” Alderoty told CNBC. “Ripple will continue to lead that fight.”
