Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, speaks at the 2022 Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills, California, U.S., May 4, 2022.
Mike Blake | Reuters
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s years-long crusade against the crypto industry appears to be over.
The final chapter closed on Wednesday, when Ripple announced that the SEC had officially dropped its four-year-old lawsuit against the company. The suit, filed on Jay Clayton’s last day as SEC chair, accused Ripple of raising $1.3 billion through the sale of its XRP token without registering it as a security.
Crypto companies and exchanges Coinbase, Kraken, Robinhood, Binance, and OpenSea all previously saw lawsuits or investigations dropped, resolved or put on hold. Ripple is now taking a victory lap.
“Ripple stands alone as the company that fought back — and won on essential legal questions — throwing a major wrench into the SEC’s plans to destroy crypto in the U.S. through enforcement,” Ripple Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty told CNBC in an emailed statement. “The SEC has now abandoned its appeal in our case. In a fitting irony, Ripple was the first major case they brought and will now be the last one they walk away from.”
XRP was created in 2012 as one of the first non-bitcoin cryptocurrencies. It was started by the founders of the company Ripple, and became the platform’s native currency. Like bitcoin, XRP can be bought and sold by retail investors. XRP jumped about 11% after Wednesday’s announcement.
Ripple spent $150 million battling the government in a bruising legal standoff with former SEC Chair Gary Gensler, whose approach to crypto was widely viewed as hostile. In July 2023, a federal judge ruled that XRP is “not necessarily a security on its face,” undercutting the foundation of the SEC’s case.
The win wasn’t just a turning point for Ripple. It signaled to the crypto industry that the tide was turning, and built momentum for a movement that helped return President Donald Trump, a former crypto critic, to the White House. A year after the judge’s ruling, Trump, as Republican nominee, delivered a keynote at the annual Bitcoin Conference, and announced that he was “laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet and the bitcoin superpower of the world.”
Ripple and its crypto peers were major contributors to Trump’s campaign. The president has spent his first two months in office paying them back.
New leadership
On Friday, the SEC hosted its first major crypto roundtable, signaling a new approach of regulation through engagement, rather than enforcement. Leading the effort is Hester Peirce, who is helming the regulator’s newly established Crypto Task Force.
Peirce’s message to the industry is that the SEC is no longer an adversary, but is instead trying to give crypto a clear, lawful framework.
In a major policy reversal, the SEC rescinded Staff Accounting Bulletin 121 — a controversial rule that required banks to treat crypto assets as liabilities on their balance sheets. Introduced in 2022 and championed by Gensler, the rule was widely viewed as a major barrier to institutional adoption of bitcoin and other digital assets.
“Bye, bye SAB 121! It’s not been fun,” Peirce wrote on in a post on X after the change was announced in January.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that month, CEOs from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Bank of America signaled that the thaw in Washington could lead to renewed crypto engagement.
U.S. President Donald Trump sits next to Crypto czar David Sacks at the White House Crypto Summit at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 7, 2025.
Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters
And at the White House, David Sacks, Trump’s AI and crypto czar, stood beside the president as he signed an executive order on digital assets. Sacks had recently attended the Crypto Ball as part of the inauguration, where he declared, “The war on crypto is over.”
Coinbase’s lawsuit was dismissed in February. Then came Kraken. The SEC pulled back from its Wells Notice against Robinhood’s crypto division. The investigation into Binance is on hold.
Ripple’s legal team long argued that the SEC’s strategy wasn’t about upholding the law, but about using it as a blunt instrument. The regulator sent subpoenas to foreign regulators that worked with Ripple, demanded troves of documents from business partners and even sued CEO Brad Garlinghouse and co-founder Chris Larsen personally. Those charges have also been dropped.
“While this chapter is closed, the fight for clear, fair, and transparent crypto regulation continues,” Alderoty told CNBC. “Ripple will continue to lead that fight.”
JoeBen Bevirt, founder and CEO of Joby Aviation, stands near an electric air taxi by Joby Aviation at the Downtown Manhattan Heliport in Manhattan, New York City, U.S., November 12, 2023.
Roselle Chen | Reuters
Joby Aviation is ramping up its manufacturing capabilities in the U.S. as it races to roll out air taxi service in 2026.
The electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) maker said Tuesday that it’s launching production at its remodeled components facility in Dayton, Ohio, and plans to double capacity at its Marina, California, manufacturing hub.
“Reimagining urban mobility takes speed, scale, and precision manufacturing. Our expanded manufacturing footprint in both California and Ohio is preparing us to do just that,” said product chief Eric Allison in a release.
Shares jumped more than 7%, building on a 16% year-to-date gain.
Joby Aviation and competitors such as Archer Aviation and Eve Air Mobility are aiming to roll out eVTOLs worldwide that can ease traffic congestion in crowded city centers, but they are awaiting regulatory approval.
The company is currently in the process of gaining Federal Aviation Administration approval for its vehicles.
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Last month, Joby Aviation shares popped on news that it delivered its first eVTOL to the United Arab Emirates, with plans to launch service in the region next year. The company agreed to an exclusive six-year deal to roll out air taxi service in Dubai last February.
Joby said the new facilities will create hundreds of new full-time jobs and underscore its commitment to fostering American innovation. At full capacity, the 435,500-square-foot California factory will manufacture as many as 24 aircraft annually.
The electric air transport company also said the opening coincided with the flight of its sixth aircraft.
Engineers from Toyota will help ramp up aircraft production to 500 annually at the Ohio facility. The companies inked a $500 million deal last year.
Shares of Joby and its competitors have ballooned in value this year as interest in the technology gains steam.
In June, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that included the creation of an air taxi testing program.
Howard Lutnick, U.S. Secretary of Commerce speaks during the Pennsylvania Energy And Innovation Summit 2025 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on July 15, 2025.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Tuesday said the Trump administration reversed course on allowing Nvidia to sell its AI chips to China because the U.S. company will not be giving over its best technology.
Lutnick made the remark speaking with CNBC’s Brian Sullivan, saying that Nvidia wants to sell China its “4th best” chip, which is slower than the fastest chips that U.S. companies use.
“We don’t sell them our best stuff, not our second best stuff, not even our third best,” Lutnick said.
Nvidia said Monday night that it would soon resume sales of the H20 chip to China after the Trump administration signaled that it would grant the chipmaker necessary export licenses.
Lutnick said that the administration said that the renewed sale of H20 chips to China was linked to a rare-earths magnet deal. Lutnick said it was in U.S. interests to have Chinese companies using American technology so they continue to use an American “tech stack.”
“The fourth one down, we want to keep China using it,” Lutnick said. “We want to keep having the Chinese use the American technology stack, because they still rely upon it.”
Similarly, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said in recent weeks that the U.S. should continue selling his chips to China so Chinese companies don’t invest in homegrown infrastructure. Huang on Sunday also said that the Chinese military wouldn’t use Nvidia chips anyway, and previously signaled that China’s Huawei is a legitimate competitor.
“The idea is the Chinese are more than capable of building their own,” Lutnick said. “You want to keep one step ahead of what they can build, so they keep buying our chips.”
The reversal is a major win for Nvidia. Huang had previously said that the Trump administration’s decision to require a license for the H20 chip in April “effectively closed” the China market. Nvidia said that it could have sold $8 billion in H20 chips in the current quarter before sales were stopped.
The administration reversed its decision after President Donald Trump met with Huang in Washington last week.
“You want to sell the Chinese enough that their developers get addicted to the American technology stack,” Lutnick said. “That’s the thinking.”
The H20 chip was introduced in 2022 in response to Biden administration export controls. It’s based on the same underlying technology as Nvidia’s Hopper-generation chips, which are sold in the U.S. as finished systems using H100 or H200 chips.
The U.S. chipmaker took some features out of the H20 in order to sell it to China, including fewer graphics processing unit cores and lower bandwidth connecting separate parts of the chip. But the success of the DeepSeek R1 model suggested that there were many Chinese companies that were just fine with the slowed-down chips. The China-specific H20 is behind Nvidia’s Blackwell chips, the H100 and the H200, Lutnick said.
Nvidia says that it releases new artificial intelligence chips every year and that serious AI developers should always try to get the latest and greatest versions because the technology is improving so quickly.
The best AI chips broadly available from clouds and system makers today are called Blackwell, and come as a GB200 chip with a paired central processing unit as well as B100 and B200 versions. Nvidia also makes a range of Blackwell-based chips for gaming and graphics that can be used for AI, but they’re generally weaker than the biggest chips designed for data centers.
A successor, called Blackwell Ultra, is only now starting to be installed in data centers, and it’s expected to ramp in volume over the next year. In 2027, Nvidia will release “Vera Rubin” chips.
The U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 27, 2025.
Elizabeth Frantz | Reuters
It’s “Crypto Week” in Washington.
The cryptocurrency industry is set to notch a major win this week if the House can pass two bills that would set up a long-lobbied-for regulatory framework for digital assets.
The stablecoin bill, known as the GENUIS Act, has already passed the Senate and looks set to become the first standalone crypto measure signed into law should the House do the same.
But the real prize for the industry is a wider and more complex bill on market structure called the CLARITY Act, which faces a more difficult path to President Donald Trump‘s desk.
Seeking CLARITY
The CLARITY Act sets the rules for when an asset is considered a security and overseen by the Securities and Exchange Commission versus when it’s considered a commodity that is overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC.
The act is likely to pass the House on Wednesday, given the bipartisan support when the bill cleared two committees. But the path in the Senate is murky, as Democrats could withhold their support over concerns about how Trump and his family are benefiting from crypto.
The Trump family’s growing crypto empire includes $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins, a stablecoin, and a decentralized finance firm called World Liberty Financial, among other ventures.
Some lawmakers who backed the narrower stablecoin bill did so with the hopes of seeing the wider market structure package address conflicts of interest.
“President Trump’s crypto corruption distorts the digital asset marketplace,” said Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., who voted for the stablecoin bill. “Writing a bill with a corruption caveat for the president sends a clear message — that Congress is not serious about addressing corruption, which we know undermines investors’ faith in capital markets.”
Pushing it to pass
Coinbase attempted to literally sweeten the deal on the CLARITY Act for lawmakers with an advertising push that included handing out about 5,000 chocolate bars around D.C.
The candy wrappers cited a Morning Consult poll that found about “1 in 5” Americans own crypto.
Coinbase, Ripple and other crypto companies are lobbying Congress to put their concerns aside and back the market structure package, anticipating that more regulatory certainty will encourage more investment in crypto.
“When consumers buy and sell and trade these digital assets, they want to know what they’re getting and they want to know that they’re using a reputable intermediary,” Coinbase Vice President of U.S. Policy Kara Calvert told CNBC. “And what this bill does is provide that construct to do that.”
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The Senate is set to introduce its own market structure bill this month that is expected to differ slightly from the House version.
Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott, R-S.C., is working with Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., and others on the measure.
Other Democrats are planning to work with Republicans on a bill, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who worked on previous market structure bills with Lummis.
“We have a lot of work to do, and we’re going to work on a bipartisan basis over the next month,” she told CNBC in a brief interview in the Capitol.
GENIUS and the Fed
The House is scheduled for a GENIUS Act vote on Thursday.
The package cleared the Senate last month with 18 Democrats joining most Republicans to support the measure.
The House stood down on their own version of the bill under pressure from Trump, who told lawmakers via a Truth Social post to “Get it to my desk, ASAP — NO DELAYS, NO ADD ONS.”
In addition to the two major bills the crypto industry has pushed for, the House will take up a separate measure that would prevent the Federal Reserve from issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC).
The bill is expected to pass in a vote scheduled for Wednesday.