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In brief
XRP is a digital asset designed for fast, low-cost global payments and serves as the native cryptocurrency of the XRP Ledger, a decentralized, open-source blockchain created by Jed McCaleb, Arthur Britto, and David Schwartz.
As of March 2025, XRP is the third largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, after Bitcoin and Ethereum, according to CoinGecko.
What is XRP?
Launched in 2012 alongside the Ripple Network, XRP has a maximum supply of 100 million coins and reached its last all-time high of $3.65 in July 2025.
Unlike Bitcoin, which acts as a decentralized store of value or digital gold, XRP was developed specifically to facilitate efficient cross-border transactions, particularly for financial institutions and payment providers.
While Ripple (originally Ripple Labs) leverages XRP in some of its payment solutions, and plays a key role in its ecosystem, the XRP Ledger operates independently as a decentralized semi-permissionless network of servers.
How does the XRP blockchain work?
While blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum use proof-of-work and proof-of-stake consensus algorithms, respectively, the XRP Ledger utilizes a unique consensus protocol called the Ripple Consensus Algorithm to validate transactions where independent validators agree on transactions.
The Ripple Consensus Algorithm ensures network agreement without proof-of-work or staking. Each node confirms transactions using a Unique Node List (UNL) of trusted validators. In rounds of consensus, nodes propose transaction sets, adjust them based on their UNL’s votes, and finalize those with at least 80% agreement. This prevents fraud while maintaining efficiency.
RPCA achieves Byzantine fault tolerance—resilience against faulty or malicious nodes attempting to disrupt consensus—while maintaining minimal latency, making it ideal for payments. It prevents forks by ensuring all honest nodes reach the same ledger state. With rapid consensus rounds and strict participation rules, XRP delivers a fast, secure, and cost-effective transaction system.
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A brief history of XRP
The SEC vs Ripple
On December 22, 2020, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit against Ripple Labs and two of its executives, alleging that they had raised over $1.3 billion through an unregistered securities offering by selling XRP.
In July 2023, a federal judge ruled that XRP was not a security when sold to the general public on digital-asset exchanges, though sales to institutional investors were deemed unregistered securities transactions.
“The SEC has not established that Ripple’s failure to register the institutional sales caused substantial losses (or the risk thereof) to investors,” U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres wrote at the time.
Following this, in August 2024, Ripple was ordered to pay a $125 million fine for violating investor protection laws, a significantly lower amount than the nearly $2 billion initially sought by the SEC.
“This is a victory for Ripple, the industry and the rule of law,” Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse tweeted at the time. “The SEC’s headwinds against the whole of the XRP community are gone.”
In October 2024, Ripple filed a cross-appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, contesting several elements of the ruling in its battle with the SEC.
Despite the partial ruling in Ripple’s favor, in January 2025, the SEC formally moved forward with its appeal, contesting the 2023 ruling that had dismissed key claims against Ripple.
In March 2025, Ripple Labs CEO Brad Garlinghouse announced that the SEC would drop its appeal, pending a vote by the Commission.
This is it – the moment we’ve been waiting for. The SEC will drop its appeal – a resounding victory for Ripple, for crypto, every way you look at it.
The future is bright. Let’s build. pic.twitter.com/7WsD0C92Cm
— Brad Garlinghouse (@bgarlinghouse) March 19, 2025
Garlinghouse tweeted a video in which he hailed a “long-overdue surrender” by the agency, accusing it of having “wiped out $15 billion of value from innocent XRP holders” in pursuing its case against Ripple Labs.
It took until August for the legal dispute to formally reach its conclusion, however, with the SEC withdrawing its appeal and Ripple abandoning its cross-appeal. Both parties agreed to bear their own legal costs, while Ripple paid a $125 million civil penalty. A permanent injunction restricting Ripple’s institutional sales of XRP remains in effect.
What makes XRP unique?
How do you get hold of XRP?
To acquire and store XRP, there are several options, including hardware, software, and cryptocurrency exchanges.
For customers in the United States, cryptocurrency exchanges, including Coinbase, Binance.US, and Crypto.com, also offer buy, sell, and trade options for XRP respectively.
Hardware wallets like Ledger and Trezor and software wallets, including Trust Wallet, Exodus, Edge, and Atomic Wallet, support XRP along with a range of other cryptocurrencies.
What can you do with XRP?
While it’s not generally seen as a tool to buy goods and services like Bitcoin, and the number of companies that accept cryptocurrency fluctuates, there are merchants that accept XRP as a form of payment, including crypto-friendly travel website Travala, and VPN services NordVPN, and SurfShark.
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The future of XRP
Since the SEC approved the first Bitcoin ETFs in early 2024, asset managers have been racing to expand crypto investment products, with XRP emerging as a contender in the push for regulated exchange-traded funds.
In October 2024, Bitwise Asset Management filed a registration statement with the SEC to launch the first spot XRP ETF, aiming to provide investors with direct exposure to the XRP token.
Following Bitwise’s lead, 21Shares submitted an S-1 form to the SEC on November 1, 2024, proposing the 21Shares Core XRP Trust to track XRP’s price. Later that month, on November 25, 2024, asset manager WisdomTree filed for an XRP ETF in Delaware. In January 2025, NYSE Arca filed an application with the SEC to convert Grayscale’s XRP trust into an ETF.
In March 2025, Chicago-based crypto exchange Bitnomial announced that it would begin offering CFTC-regulated XRP futures contracts, enabling traders to speculate on or hedge against the future price of XRP.
In the run-up to Donald Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, seen by many as a major turning point for cryptocurrency in the United States, Ripple President Monica Long told Bloomberg that she expected an XRP ETF to be “coming soon.” Adding fuel to this speculation were images of Garlinghouse meeting with Trump in Washington, D.C., in January 2025.
By August 2025, traders on prediction market Myriad anticipated a greater than 60% chance of an XRP ETF being approved before a Litecoin ETF in 2025 (Disclaimer: Myriad was launched by Decrypt‘s parent company DASTAN).
This article was first published in 2019 and was updated in August 2025.
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