The Year in XRP 2025: New Highs After 7 Years as Ripple’s SEC Case Finally Ends

Crypto’s biggest wins are often tightly connected to the rise in asset prices, but Ripple’s 2025 successes extend far beyond the price of XRP—the Ripple-linked asset that sits inside the top five crypto assets by market capitalization. 

Instead, most of the biggest headlines attached to the financial services organization were irrelevant to trading screens, most notably the conclusion to its years-long battle with the SEC, major acquisitions to propel its future growth, and the launch of a billion-dollar stablecoin product—RLUSD.

Below we’ll look back at the biggest highlights for XRP and Ripple in 2025. 

Ripple, SEC saga comes to an end

More than four years after it began, the legal dispute between Ripple Labs Inc. and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) officially came to a close in August.

The landmark case, which investigated whether or not sales of XRP violated securities laws, extended back to December 2020. In 2023, a partial ruling favored Ripple Labs, but appeals and counter-appeals extended the saga into 2025.

However, with the election of President Donald Trump and a crypto-friendlier regulatory administration, the pair opted to find a jointly negotiated resolution in early 2025. 

That negotiated resolution was later denied by a U.S. district judge, and then by the courts, so eventually the pair agreed to drop their respective appeals—ending the affair for good and cementing the 2023 ruling in Ripple’s favor as a precedent for future crypto classifications. 

XRP marks a new all-time high

Prior to 2025, XRP had last traded above $3.00 in 2018. 

Seven years later, and around a month before the conclusion to Ripple Labs’ yearslong legal battle with the SEC, the Ripple-linked XRP made a new all-time high of $3.65, according to data from CoinGecko, surging beyond its previous high mark of $3.40 from 2018. 

That made XRP the third-largest crypto asset by market capitalization at the time, trailing just Bitcoin and Ethereum. With regulatory scrutiny waning, analysts at the time told Decrypt that investors “believed in Ripple’s vision for a regulatory-compliant blockchain for institutions.”

Though its rapid rise placed the token in a range it had not seen since 2018, investment firms like Standard Chartered maintained even higher end-of-year price targets for XRP during the summer—expecting a move to $5.50 by the end of year. 

That mark seems unlikely now though, despite the acceleration of the tokenization trend that Standard Chartered highlighted as a potential catalyst for the price of XRP. 

XRP, now the fourth-largest asset by market capitalization, was changing hands at $1.90 as of December 15, around 48% off its July all-time high.

XRP joins ETF party

After the approval and ensuing success of ETFs for crypto majors Bitcoin and Ethereum, both investors and fund issuers were eager to get altcoin ETFs—like those for XRP, Solana, and Dogecoin—to market. 

As a result, applications for altcoin ETFs flooded the SEC, and by June, expert opinions predicted the likelihood of their approvals as a “near lock” for 2025. Those opinions were further validated in September when the SEC cleared a path to approval for new ETFs by signing off on new generic listing standards.

Around that time, Rex Shares and Osprey Funds got their joint XRP ETF to market—an Act 40 ETF that follows different listing standards than other crypto ETFs. Demand for the product was shown immediately, grabbing $38 million in day one volume, good enough to mark the year’s biggest debut up until that point. 

Shortly thereafter, though, more traditional spot ETF products from Canary Capital, Grayscale, Bitwise, and Franklin Templeton hit the market. In December, leveraged products hit the market as well, allowing investors to double their exposure to XRP’s gains.

Since their launch, the spot ETFs have generated nearly $1 billion in net inflows without a single day of outflows, according to data from CoinGlass, as of December 15.

RLUSD becomes a billion-dollar stablecoin

XRP eclipsed a major milestone in 2025, but so did Ripple Labs’ stablecoin, RLUSD. 

First launched in December 2024, the dollar-backed stablecoin frontran the growing trend of stablecoin products from other financial giants like Western Union and JP Morgan, and the passing of the GENIUS Act, which provided regulatory clarity on the issuance and trading of the fiat-backed tokens. 

In the year since its launch, functionality for RLUSD has expanded. In September it was added to Securitize’s tokenization platform, a BlackRock-backed platform that now allows users to exchange shares of tokenized money market funds for RLUSD. In December the firm earned approval to broaden payment services, including RLUSD, in Singapore as well.

It’s being used for credit card settlements too, thanks to a partnership with Mastercard and WebBank, the issuer of crypto exchange Gemini’s credit card products. 

While RLUSD is regulated by the New York Department of Financial Services, Ripple applied for a National Bank Charter in July, following the lead of USDC issuer Circle, as it aims to become the “benchmark for trust” in the stablecoin market. And it received conditional approval in December, alongside other stablecoin issuers.

At the time of writing, the stablecoin has reached a $1.3 billion market cap, making it the 11th largest stablecoin in less than a year since its launch, according to data from DefiLlama. 

Ripple’s shopping spree

Though closely linked to XRP, Ripple is much larger and more expansive than a single crypto token, and its footprint grew considerably throughout 2025 thanks to major acquisitions. 

In April, the firm forked over $1.25 billion to acquire primer brokerage Hidden Road as it aimed to better serve institutional clients on a larger scale. 

It then spent another $1 billion to acquire treasury asset management firm GTreasury in October, in a play that will reduce friction and costs associated with legacy financial systems, according to CEO Brad Garlinghouse. 

It surrounded that acquisition with two others, paying $200 million to add Toronto-based stablecoin platform Rail, and an undisclosed amount on wallet-as-a-service provider Palisade.

All told, Ripple’s acquisitions in 2025 maintain a similar theme, improving payment efficiencies while expanding its financial services offerings. 

Those moves helped the firm notch a $500 million investment in November, valuing it at $40 billion and cementing its place among the current and future leaders of the crypto industry. 

“This investment isn’t just validation of Ripple’s growth strategy and business built on the foundation of XRP, but also a clear bet on what the future of crypto will look like,” Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse wrote on X. “I’m very proud of what we’ve built, and all that’s to come.”