Crypto’s long battle with SEC comes to a close with Ripple victory

Published

8 months ago

March 22, 2025

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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.

Bitcoin surges as namesake conference welcomes Donald Trump to Nashville

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.”

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Trump addresses Digital Asset Summit, urges Congress to pass stablecoin bill: CNBC Crypto World

Technology

Chinese tech giant Tencent’s quarterly revenue rises 15%, fueled by AI

Published

3 hours ago

November 13, 2025

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Chinese tech giant Tencent's quarterly revenue rises 15%, fueled by AI

Tencent on Thursday posted 15% year-on-year revenue growth, with AI boosting the Chinese tech giant’s performance in advertising targeting and gaming.

Here’s how Tencent performed in the third quarter of 2025, per earnings released on Thursday:

Revenue: 192.9 billion Chinese yuan ($27.12 billion), surpassing the 189.2 billion Chinese yuan expected analysts, according to data compiled by LSEG.
Operating profit: 63.6 billion yuan, versus 58.01 billion yuan expected by the street.

Tencent boosted its capital expenditure earlier this year as it ramped up AI and eyed European expansion for its cloud computing services, which would compete against market leaders Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. It has its own AI foundational model in China called Hunyuan, however it also uses DeepSeek in some products.

Tencent shares are up 56.7% year-to-date.

This is a breaking news story. Please refresh for updates.

Technology

CNBC Daily Open: There’s the AI market, and then there’s ‘everything else’

Published

4 hours ago

November 13, 2025

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CNBC Daily Open: There's the AI market, and then there's 'everything else'

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Nov. 12, 2025 in New York City.

Spencer Platt | Getty Images

The divergence between the performance of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq Composite on Wednesday stateside reinforces the suggestion that there are two markets operating in the U.S.: one of an artificial intelligence and another of “everything else.”

Not only did the Dow rise, it also secured its second consecutive record high and closed above the 48,000 level for the first time.

The index, which comprises 30 blue-chip companies, is typically seen as a marker of the “old economy.” That is to say, it is mostly made up of large, well-established companies driving the U.S. economy, such as banks, healthcare and industrials, before Silicon Valley became a mini sun powering everything.

And it was those stocks — Goldman Sachs, Eli Lilly and Caterpillar — that lifted the Dow on Wednesday.

To be sure, new and flashy names, such as Nvidia and Salesforce, constitute the Dow too. But as the index is price-weighted, meaning that companies with higher share prices influence the Dow more, tech companies don’t exert as much gravity on it.

That’s in contrast to the Nasdaq, which is weighted by companies’ market capitalization, and dominated mainly by technology firms. The tech-heavy index fell as shares like Oracle and Palantir slipped — even Advanced Micro Devices’ 9% pop on its growth prospects couldn’t rescue the Nasdaq from the red.

It’s not necessarily a warning sign about overexuberance in AI.

“There’s nothing wrong, in our view, of kind of trimming back, taking some gains and re-diversifying across other spots in the equity markets,” said Josh Chastant, portfolio manager of public investments at GuideStone Fund.

But what investors would really like is if fork in the road merges into one. That tends to be the safer path to take.

What you need to know today

And finally…

People walk by the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on June 18, 2024 in New York City.

Spencer Platt | Getty Images

Why private equity is stuck with ‘zombie companies’ it can’t sell

Private equity firms are facing a new reality: a growing crop of companies that can neither thrive nor die, lingering in portfolios like the undead.

These so-called “zombie companies” refer to businesses that aren’t growing, barely generate enough cash to service debt and are unable to attract buyers even at a discount. They are usually trapped on a fund’s balance sheet beyond its expected holding period.

— Lee Ying Shan