Ripple Sends New Letter To The SEC: What It Could Mean For XRP
Ripple has despatched a brand new market-structure letter to the SEC’s Crypto Task Force, urging the company to attract a tough line between a securities providing and the underlying token which will later commerce in secondary markets, a framing that would matter for the way XRP (put up SEC lawsuit) and different tokens are handled in disclosure and jurisdiction debates.
In the January 9, 2026 submission, signed by Chief Legal Officer Stuart Alderoty, General Counsel Sameer Dhond, and Deputy General Counsel Deborah McCrimmon, Ripple positions its feedback as enter to ongoing Commission rulemaking or steering, explicitly tying its argument to parallel legislative efforts on Capitol Hill.
The firm references earlier letters from March 21, 2025 and May 27, 2025, and factors to the House’s CLARITY Act of 2025 and Senate dialogue drafts as proof that classification decisions will cascade into “jurisdiction, disclosures, and secondary-market therapy.”
Ripple Presses SEC To Cement XRP’s Post-Lawsuit Status
Ripple’s core thesis is that regulators ought to transfer away from “decentralization” as a authorized metric as a result of it’s “not a binary state” and creates “insupportable uncertainty,” together with each “false adverse” and “false optimistic” outcomes.
One of Ripple’s key issues is that an asset might be handled as caught in a securities regime just because an entity nonetheless holds stock or continues contributing to growth, some extent with apparent parallels to Ripple. The firm nonetheless holds a big chunk of all XRP in their escrow whereas developer arm RippleX contributes closely to the event of the XRP Ledger.
Instead, Ripple pushes the SEC to floor jurisdiction in “authorized rights and obligations,” emphasizing enforceable guarantees relatively than market narratives about ongoing efforts. The letter argues that regulatory theories specializing in “efforts of others” danger collapsing the multi-part Howey evaluation right into a single issue and, in Ripple’s view, sweeping too broadly.
The most consequential part is Ripple’s argument that the SEC’s jurisdiction ought to be time-bound to the “lifespan of the duty,” relatively than treating the asset as completely labeled. In a passage that goes on to secondary-market implications, Ripple writes:
“The Commission’s jurisdiction ought to monitor the lifespan of the duty; regulating the ‘promise’ whereas it exists, however liberating the ‘asset’ as soon as that promise is fulfilled or in any other case ends. The dispositive issue is the holder’s authorized rights, not their financial hopes. Without that vibrant line, the definition of a safety, and the SEC’s jurisdictional limits, develop into amorphous and unbounded.”
That framing issues for XRP and attracts parallels to the SEC lawsuit: whether or not secondary-market buying and selling of a token can stay topic to securities-law oversight lengthy after any preliminary distribution, advertising and marketing, or development-era statements. Ripple explicitly rejects the concept lively secondary buying and selling is itself a jurisdictional hook, evaluating high-velocity crypto markets to identify commodities like gold and silver and even secondary markets for client gadgets.
Ripple additionally spends significant time on the “capital elevating” boundary, arguing for privity as a vibrant line that distinguishes major distributions from alternate buying and selling the place counterparties are unknown and the issuer is “merely as one other market actor.”
In that context, the letter warns that treating each issuer sale as a perpetual capital increase creates “perverse outcomes,” together with what it calls a “Zombie Promise” and “Operational Paralysis”: language that, whereas generalized, clearly speaks to issues round issuer-held token inventories and the compliance burdens that would connect to treasury administration and gross sales practices.
Separately, Ripple endorses “fit-for objective” disclosures in instances the place securities regulation is definitely warranted, relatively than forcing “full company registration designed for conventional fairness.” For XRP holders and market individuals, that could be a directional sign: Ripple is arguing for a regime the place disclosure triggers connect to particular guarantees or particular types of ongoing management, to not the token as an object indefinitely.
The timing can also be notable. Ripple dated the letter January 9, 2026, lower than per week earlier than a January 15 markup on complete digital-asset market structure legislation within the US Senate Banking Committee, an approaching deadline that would form how classification language, jurisdictional strains, and disclosure ideas harden into legislative textual content.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.05.
