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Binance.US and eToro are the latest platforms to suspend XRP trading in the U.S.. U.S. customers will not be able to trade XRP on eToro on January 3. Customers with existing trades at the time will have three weeks from that date to close all open positions. For Binance.US, the effective date of its XRP delisting is January 13. They join Coinbase and many other exchanges to halt XRP trading for American traders, plus Coinbase is the subject of a lawsuit from a disgruntled trader accusing the platform of knowingly selling XRP as an unlicensed security to its users.

The price of XRP crashed following a huge airdrop that will credit all XRP holders who hold funds in participating exchanges and wallets with free Spark (FLR) tokens. On the morning of December 12, immediately after the airdrop all of the top ten coins by market capitalization were up 2-4% but XRP was down about 10%. The FLR, to be distributed by Flare Network on a yet-unreleased blockchain, is a smart contract utility fork of XRP. The pair will attempt to challenge Ethereum's dominance in decentralized finance (defi) and decentralized applications (dapps). Flare integrates with Ethereum's Virtual Machine, allowing existing Ethereum dapps to be ported over to Flare to serve the XRP ecosystem.

On Jan. 1, 2021, a petition was filed in Rhode Island seeking to halt the SEC's claims as to XRP owned by a group of purchases. John Deaton, an attorney with class action experience, claims in the petition that he and others like him did not buy XRP as an investment or consider it to be a security. Paragraph 45 of the complaint suggests that XRP is a currency, virtual currency or commodity, or utility token, and, therefore, not a security. In support of this conclusion, Deaton argues that XRP has a number of uses that essentially preclude it from being classified as a security.

The plaintiff's primary argument in this case has been that Ripple Labs advertises the XRP token as a utilitarian tool to further greater business interests. They assert that the company instead uses the sale of XRP as its primary source of revenue, having no real interest in using the token for any other purpose. They have presented as evidence the fact that XRP is not needed for Ripple's key services, such as xVia and xRapid (now RippleNet). Ripple Labs denies this claim, and insists that it has always been transparent about its use of XRP.

While Ripple was forced to liquidate many of its XRP holdings to stay cash flow positive, online XRP Twitter engagement fell by 16% Q1 2020 and the number of users in the "XRP Army"has declined 82% since January 2018.

In its Flipside Crypto "4 Things To Know About XRP Money Flows", Flipside Crypto analyzes the flows of XRP through the ecosystem and notes that activity for XRP drops significantly on the weekend. It theorizes that this is likely due to a lack of consumer or retail interest in the asset.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) intends to sue Ripple over its sale of XRP, with Ripple cofounder Chris Larsen and CEO Garlinghouse also named as defendants alongside the firm. The lawsuit revolves around whether XRP, a digital asset that the company launched in 2012, is actually a security that should have been registered with the SEC. In recent years, the SEC has ruled that Bitcoin and Ethereum are not securities, partly on the grounds they are decentralized with no person or company in control of them. By contrast, 100 billion units of XRP were issued in 2012 for Ripple Labs which has been selling them into the market in scheduled allotments.

Coinbase will suspend the XRP trading pairs on its platform. Trading will move into limit only starting December 28, 2020 at 2:30 PM PST, and will be fully suspended on Tuesday, January 19, 2021 at 10 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. The trading suspension will not affect customers' access to XRP wallets which will remain available for deposit and withdraw functionality after the trading suspension. Further, customers will remain eligible for the previously announced Spark airdrop (subject to approval in certain jurisdictions), and it will continue to support XRP on Coinbase Custody and Coinbase Wallet.

Ripple Labs has often claimed that XRP has nothing to do with Ripple Labs the company, that XRP pre-existed Ripple Labs the company and was gifted to it, and that the protocol that runs XRP is totally decentralized, à la Bitcoin. However, this blog comprehensively shows that this is untrue.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed an amended complaint towards Ripple, accusing the firm of purposely misleading investors in relation to its XRP crypto-asset. The original complaint accuses Ripple Labs and its lead executives of being in violation of securities laws with $1.3 billion generated from XRP sales. It now alleges that they purposely manipulated XRP's price by increasing and decreasing XRP sales depending on market conditions.

XRP's price had gradually surged from $0.27 on January 25 to $0.40 on the 30th, the momentum contributing to a narrative that it was going to boom, despite the fact that a legal fight between Ripple and the SEC is in a very nascent phase. A couple of hours before 8:30am ET on February 1, with confidence reaching fever pitch, XRP hit $0.7448. At that point, whales began to offload their XRP and the coin's value dropped over the course of the morning to as low as $0.38. On the stock markets, pump and dumps like this are a form of securities fraud-but no such regulations exist in the crypto space.

Ripple's XRP is having a disastrous start to 2019. In a year when bitcoin is storming back towards bull territory, XRP has crashed 16 percent. The third-largest cryptocurrency is now the worst-performing digital asset in the top ten.

Ripple, the company behind settlement-oriented crypto asset XRP, is promising a higher degree of accuracy for XRP volumes and sales.

According to "Why Is XRP Underperforming?" report by cryptocurrency exchange OKEx, "as a payment solution provider, Ripple is facing intense competition," and "any negative impact on the company could easily transform into undesirable price actions in XRP."

A new class-action lawsuit has been filed against crypto giant Ripple and its CEO Brad Garlinghouse alleging securities laws violations regarding the sale and marketing of XRP. The lawsuit alleges that Ripple created the XRP cryptocurrency for the sole purpose of making its founders and a few other people rich.

The analysis in this paper reveals that only a small fraction of EOS, Tezos and XRP transactions are used for value transfer purposes. In particular, 95% of the transactions on EOS were triggered by the airdrop of a currently valueless token; on Tezos, 82% of throughput was used for maintaining consensus; and only 2% of transactions on the XRP ledger lead to value transfers.

Ripple is proposing a major XRP ledger upgrade that the company says could unleash decentralized finance (DeFi) and smart contracts across the broader XRP ecosystem without decreasing XRPL's efficiency. Ripple plans to accomplish this through the use of federated sidechains, according David Schwartz, the company's chief technology officer.

XRP has continued to soar after Ripple's motion was granted to keep the financial records of CEO Brad Garlinghouse and his predecessor Chris Larsen private from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) lawsuit against the firm. The case hinges on the classification of XRP as a security (i.e. a financial asset from which the investor intends to profit), as opposed to a currency or medium of exchange. By failing to file a securities registration statement or seek special exemption, the SEC is accusing Ripple of violating multiple sections of the Securities Act of 1933. Earlier in the week, Ripple had won another skirmish when it was granted permission to get access to the SEC's documents related to its exemption of Bitcoin and Ethereum from being given "security" status.

Under a fair application of the Howey test and the U.S. SEC's expanding analysis, XRP should not be regulated as a security, but instead considered a currency or a medium of exchange, according to ex-CFTC Commissioner Christopher Giancarlo. The increased adoption of XRP as a medium of exchange and a form of payment in recent years, both by consumers and in the business-to-business setting, further underscores the utility of XRP as a bona fide fiat substitute.