In brief
- The SEC in December 2020 hit Ripple with a $1.3 billion lawsuit over XRP token sales.
- Ripple and the SEC have now wrapped up the case—and Ripple will pay $50 million to settle it.
- XRP, the fourth-biggest cryptocurrency by market cap, is up Thursday.
The Securities and Exchange Commission and Ripple Labs have officially settled a long-running lawsuit—over four years after the regulator went after the fintech firm.
Wall Street’s top regulator the SEC announced the settlement Thursday, after Ripple execs said in March that the agency was backing off. Ripple and two of its executives, CEO Brad Garlinghouse and Executive Chairman Chris Larsen, will pay a total of $50 million to the SEC to settle the case, the announcement said. Ripple had previously disclosed the $50 million agreement in March.
The SEC under previous Chair Gary Gensler—who went hard after major crypto companies during the Biden administration—had initially requested that Ripple pay a $2 billion fine.
District Court Judge Analisa Torres ordered Ripple to pay a $125 million fine last year. The SEC said that under the settlement agreement filed with the court Thursday, $50 million will go to the regulator, with the remainder of the escrow funds (just over $75 million) going back to Ripple. Judge Torres must approve the agreed-upon settlement.
Decrypt could not immediately reach Ripple for comment.
The SEC in 2020 hit Ripple with a $1.3 billion lawsuit, alleging that the company sold unregistered securities in the form of the cryptocurrency XRP to investors to raise funds. Then, in 2023, a judge ruled that programmatic sales of XRP on cryptocurrency exchanges to retail investors did not qualify as securities.
The ruling was cheered by both Ripple and the crypto industry, despite the judge also ruling that $728 million worth of tokens for institutional sales did constitute unregistered securities sales.
Since President Donald Trump took office, the SEC under its new leadership has taken a softer stance towards the crypto space and has scrapped a number of lawsuits and investigations. President Trump campaigned with promises to help the crypto industry.
XRP is the fourth-biggest digital coin in existence, with a market cap of over $132 billion. Ripple’s founders created XRP, and the firm now uses it for its payments services.
The price of XRP rose following the news; the cryptocurrency is now priced at $2.30, up more than 8% in over a 24-hour period, CoinGecko shows.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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