Following the 2023 Torres ruling, which became final when both sides dropped their appeals in 2025, XRP sold programmatically on exchanges (to the public) is not in itself a security. Certain past institutional sales by Ripple were found to be unregistered securities offerings.

What's the difference between Ripple and XRP?

Ripple is a company that builds payment software and is the largest contributor to the XRP Ledger. XRP is the ledger's native, independent digital asset. Ripple holds a large amount of XRP but does not 'own' the open-source network.

What is XRP actually used for?

Fast, low-cost value transfer — paying tiny transaction fees, acting as a bridge asset between currencies in cross-border payments, and underpinning the ledger's built-in exchange. Ripple's payments network uses it to move value between institutions.

XRP & the XRP Ledger: the payments chain that beat the SEC

XRP might be the most polarizing asset in crypto. To its holders it’s the institutional payments coin that was wronged by regulators and vindicated in court; to its critics it’s a semi-centralized token propped up by one company. The truth, as usual, is more interesting than either camp wants to admit — and after five years under a legal cloud that lifted in 2025, the XRP Ledger is finally being judged on what it does rather than what a lawsuit said about it. Here’s the whole picture, strengths and warts.

This is the overview; the deep mechanics live in the linked explainers on consensus, payments and the DEX, and the RLUSD stablecoin.

What the XRP Ledger actually is

The XRP Ledger (XRPL) launched in 2012 — older than most of crypto — built by David Schwartz, Jed McCaleb, and Arthur Britto specifically to move money quickly and cheaply. (McCaleb later left and went on to create Stellar, which is why the two networks are technical cousins.) It’s an open-source, public blockchain that settles transactions in three to five seconds for a fraction of a cent, with a built-in exchange and a deliberate focus on payments rather than general computation.

The single most important distinction to get straight: Ripple is a company; XRP is an asset; the XRPL is a network. Ripple builds payment software and is the largest contributor to the ledger, and it holds a great deal of XRP — but it doesn’t own the open-source network any more than a major contributor owns the internet. Conflating the three is the root of half the bad takes about XRP.

How it reaches agreement

Like Stellar, XRPL uses neither mining nor staking. It runs the XRP Ledger Consensus Protocol (historically the Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm), in which validators each follow a Unique Node List — the set of validators they trust not to collude — and a roughly 80% supermajority agrees each ledger into existence every few seconds. The upside is speed, near-zero energy use, and no mining economics. The trade-off, and the source of the loudest criticism, is that this is a trust-based model rather than a permissionless one, and Ripple publishes a recommended validator list. I dig into how decentralized that really is in the consensus explainer.

Payments, the DEX, and the AMM

This is XRPL’s home turf. It shipped with a decentralized exchange built into the protocol in 2012 — one of the oldest on-chain order books in existence — plus pathfinding that automatically routes a payment across currencies, using XRP as a bridge when two assets lack a deep direct market. Send one currency, the recipient gets another, settled in seconds. In 2024 the ledger added a native automated market maker that plugs directly into that order book, so pooled liquidity and traditional limit orders share one venue.

On top of this sits Ripple Payments (the network formerly known as On-Demand Liquidity), which moves value between financial institutions using XRP as the bridge asset and now serves a few hundred institutional customers. Full detail in the payments explainer.

RLUSD: Ripple’s own stablecoin

In December 2024 Ripple launched RLUSD, a dollar stablecoin issued under a New York Department of Financial Services trust charter, with reserves in cash and cash equivalents and custody involving BNY Mellon. It’s issued natively on both the XRP Ledger and Ethereum, and as of late May 2026 it had grown to roughly $1.8 billion in circulation — fast growth from a near-standing start, though still an order of magnitude behind USDT and USDC.

The strategic logic is sharp: by running its own regulated stablecoin, Ripple captures more of the cross-border payments value chain and gives counterparties a stable settlement asset, while XRP continues to do the bridging underneath. There’s a live debate about whether RLUSD undercuts the case for XRP — Ripple’s answer is that they do different jobs — and it’s worth taking seriously. More in the RLUSD explainer.

Programmability, on purpose, at the edges

XRPL was deliberately not built as a smart-contract platform — its minimalism is a feature for a payments rail. Programmability has been added at the edges instead: Hooks, lightweight native logic for simple on-ledger rules, and more significantly the XRPL EVM Sidechain, which went live in 2026 and lets Solidity developers deploy Ethereum-style contracts that settle back to the XRPL, using Axelar to bridge to dozens of other chains. RLUSD is already live on it. It’s a coherent strategy — keep the base layer fast and simple, push complex DeFi to a connected sidechain — though XRPL’s on-chain DeFi is still small, with total value locked in the low hundreds of millions versus Ethereum’s tens of billions.

The SEC case — and what it actually settled

No honest XRP page can skip this, because it defined the asset for five years. The SEC sued Ripple in December 2020, alleging XRP was an unregistered security. In July 2023, Judge Analisa Torres delivered the ruling that changed everything: XRP sold programmatically to the public on exchanges is not, in itself, a security, though certain direct institutional sales by Ripple were unregistered offerings. The court imposed a civil penalty of about $125 million. Both sides appealed, sparred through 2025 over a proposed settlement the judge wouldn’t fully accept, and finally dropped their appeals in 2025, leaving the 2023 decision as the final word.

The practical effect was enormous. The regulatory cloud that had kept U.S. institutions at arm’s length was gone, and the consequences came fast: several spot XRP ETFs launched in the U.S. between late 2025 and early 2026, pulling in over a billion dollars in early inflows. Whatever you think of XRP, it now has something most tokens don’t — a court ruling on its status and regulated investment products built on it.

XRP the asset

A clear-eyed look at tokenomics matters here. All 100 billion XRP were created at the ledger’s genesis — there is no mining and no new issuance. Ripple holds a large portion in a series of escrows, releasing some on a schedule, which is exactly the concentration critics point to. Each transaction destroys a tiny amount of XRP as its fee, making the asset mildly deflationary, and accounts must hold a small XRP reserve. XRP’s job is to be neutral plumbing — fees and bridging — not a yield instrument.

The honest trade-offs

The centralization question is fair. Ripple’s large XRP holdings, its role as lead developer, and its published validator list mean XRPL is decentralized in a more qualified sense than a proof-of-work chain. It’s improved over the years, but “Ripple has outsized influence” is a reasonable thing to say, not just FUD.
The XRP utility debate is real. If RLUSD and other stablecoins handle settlement, how much bridging does XRP actually need to do? Ripple has answers, but the question deserves more than a reflexive dismissal — it’s the core of the bear case.
DeFi is thin. The payments-first design that makes XRPL clean also means its on-chain DeFi ecosystem is small and young compared to Ethereum or Solana.
Supply concentration. Scheduled escrow releases put a large, known quantity of XRP in one company’s hands — a structural overhang worth understanding.

Where it’s heading

The thesis now is straightforward to state, if not to guarantee: with the legal overhang gone, regulated ETFs live, a growing in-house stablecoin, and a payments network targeting a slice of the multi-trillion-dollar cross-border market, XRP is positioned to be judged as infrastructure rather than a court case. Whether it captures that opportunity depends on real adoption volume, not narrative — which is exactly what I track.

Keep reading

Want the ongoing analysis? I publish regular deep-dives on Stellar, XRP and Cosmos — subscribe here.

Informational only, not financial advice. Figures (RLUSD size, ETF flows, DeFi TVL) are current as of mid-2026 and move quickly — verify before relying on them.

Sources: XRP Ledger Foundation and RippleX documentation, Ripple (RLUSD, payments), SEC and court filings in SEC v. Ripple (2020–2025), and public market data.

Last updated 2026-06