As of April 2, XRP's market cap is $27.9 billion, making it the 7th-largest cryptocurrency.
In brief
The price of XRP is up 170% since the start of the year.
Investors may think the SEC's case against Ripple won't amount to much.
Usually, legal troubles are bad news for stock prices and crypto assets. XRP, the native asset of the Ripple payments platform, is proving to be an exception.
After rising over 5% in the last day, the price of an XRP token is now $0.60, and the market cap is $27.9 billion, according to data from Nomics. That's higher than where the price was before the SEC filed a $1.3 billion lawsuit against Ripple Labs. On December 18, 2020, four days before the suit, XRP was worth $0.58 with a market cap under $27 billion.
It’s been a remarkable turnaround for the token, which dipped as low as $0.17 after the SEC brought the lawsuit. The SEC says that Ripple Labs, co-founder and executive chairman Chris Larsen, and co-founder/CEO Brad Garlinghouse, are responsible for $1.3 billion in unregistered securities offerings—XRP being the unregistered security in question.
Broadly speaking, a security is an investment contract that signifies a stake in a financial venture with the expectation of future profits. The SEC regulates securities sales in the US.
In the wake of the allegations, several exchanges and trading platforms—among them Coinbase, Binance.US, Blockchain.com, Crypto.com, and eToro—suspended XRP trading. Ripple has also suffered setbacks; its partnership with MoneyGram ended in March after the latter cited “uncertainty concerning their ongoing litigation.”