Ripple: the SEC gives up, and the XRP crypto soars

The SEC has decided to drop its lawsuit against executives of Ripple and related crypto XRP. 

The price of crypto XRP rose 7%. 

SEC: surrender against Ripple and crypto XRP

Ripple’s Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty said that this is not a settlement, but an outright surrender by the SEC.

However, a due and important clarification must be made. 

The matter in fact is not entirely closed. 

The SEC’s complaint against Ripple actually concerned three separate, though closely related, entities. 

The first was the cryptocurrency XRP, which in July was completely cleared of having to be considered a security. 

The second was the company Ripple, whose lawsuit has not yet reached a conclusion. 

The third was precisely Ripple’s executives, namely current CEO Brad Garlinghouse and former CEO Chris Larsen. 

So the SEC lost against both XRP and Ripple executives, but not yet against the Ripple company. In the former case the defeat was decreed by a judge, while in the latter case it was the SEC that raised the white flag. 

The charges against Ripple executives

In the specific case of Ripple executives, they were accused of having responsibilities specifically in selling XRP as an unregistered security. 

Indeed, it should be pointed out that the judge who ruled that XRP cannot be considered a security was referring only to the current state of the cryptocurrency, and especially only to the secondary markets, i.e., the exchanges where XRP owners sell it. 

Instead, that same ruling in fact assumed that XRP was initially sold by the company Ripple as an unregistered security, and that issue has not yet been definitively resolved. 

But the fact that they have decided to surrender against the CEOs who, according to the SEC, were allegedly responsible for those primary market sales seems to suggest that the hypothesis of the sale as an unregistered security has weakened. 

So Garlinghouse and Larsen come out of this clean for now, but the affair is not yet completely over. 

The XRP cryptocurrency

XRP is a cryptocurrency that was initially launched as the cryptocurrency of the company Ripple. It was later somewhat detached, thanks to a blockchain that in theory is supposed to be decentralized. 

Despite this, the world’s largest holder of XRP is still the same company Ripple, which still owns nearly half of all existing XRP tokens. 

Yesterday the market value of XRP was about $0.49, but today, after the news of the SEC’s surrender, it has risen to $0.52. 

This is not a real boom, since in July it also exceeded $0.80. However, it should be remembered that in June it was at $0.48, and in late December 2022 it was even below $0.40. 

During the great bull run of 2021 it had risen as high as $1.6, so the loss since then is still significant. Moreover, the all-time high is still $3.8 in January 2018, and since then the loss turns out to be 86 percent. 

In other words, today’s movement is not particularly important, although it is significant, since the current price is still significantly lower than in the past, and especially than in July. 

It probably still hangs in the balance that in the end the SEC may at least be right that XRP was originally sold as an unregistered security. This could cause problems for Ripple, and since the price of XRP is always closely linked to that of the company, the risk of a negative impact remains. 

Solana’s reaction

Another cryptocurrency that seems to be in a similar situation is Solana’s SOL, since Solana is indeed a company. 

It is no coincidence that today the price of SOL rose 14 percent, returning above $27.

This is the annual high for 2023, and it has not been at these levels since before the FTX bankruptcy. 

2023 was not an easy year for Solana, although the bulk of the losses occurred in late 2022 precisely because of the FTX bankruptcy. 

Despite this, SOL’s price is still 89 percent below the all-time high of November 2021, but if nothing else it seems to have come out of the tunnel it entered in November 2022.