# Ripple San Francisco payments company (founded 2012 by [[Chris Larsen]] and Jed McCaleb; chief executive Brad Garlinghouse since 2017) that issues the XRP token and sells bank-to-bank settlement software built on it. Ripple matters here for two reasons: its SEC case was the industry's flagship fight over whether a token is a security, and it is one of the three anchor funders — with [[Coinbase]] and a16z — of [[Fairshake PAC]], which made crypto the largest single-industry spender of the 2024 cycle ([[Crypto Super PACs]], [[Crypto-Political Machine]]). ## SEC v. Ripple The SEC sued in December 2020, claiming XRP was an unregistered security and seeking about $2 billion. Judge Analisa Torres split the difference in July 2023 — institutional sales were securities offerings, programmatic sales on exchanges were not — and in August 2024 imposed a **$125 million** penalty, under 7% of the demand. The new Commission dropped its appeal in March 2025 and the case closed that summer, one of the eight-plus crypto enforcement actions the second-term SEC abandoned. The ruling's "it depends how it was sold" logic is now the working doctrine, and the reason the industry wanted a market-structure statute to lock it in. ## Since Everything the company could not do under enforcement it did after. XRP passed $3 in January 2025 and hit about $3.65 in July before halving by year-end; spot XRP ETFs launched from November 2025 with about $1.1 billion of inflows in the first month; the RLUSD stablecoin (late 2024) reached a $1.3 billion market cap with BNY Mellon as custodian; Ripple bought the prime broker Hidden Road for $1.25 billion (April 2025); and in **December 2025 the [[OCC]] gave conditional approval to Ripple National Trust Bank** — alongside Circle, Paxos and BitGo — putting a crypto issuer under federal bank supervision. Garlinghouse's reaction was aimed at the bank lobby: "you've complained that crypto isn't playing by the same rules — here's the crypto industry, directly under the OCC's supervision." The [[GENIUS Act]] and the [[Cryptocurrency Regulation Timeline]] carry the statutory side; the [[Stablecoin]] page the product. Ripple's place in the [[California Tech Exodus Ecosystem]] is the stay-and-fight variant: it did not leave San Francisco, it bought the regulator's attention instead. ## See Also - [[Chris Larsen]] · [[Coinbase]] · [[Brian Armstrong]] · [[Fairshake PAC]] · [[Crypto Super PACs]] · [[Crypto-Political Machine]] - [[SEC]] · [[OCC]] · [[GENIUS Act]] · [[Stablecoin]] · [[Cryptocurrency Regulation Timeline]] · [[Cryptocurrency Ecosystem]] · [[California Tech Exodus Ecosystem]]