XRP (CRYPTO: XRP), the native token of the XRP Ledger, has declined more than 60% over the past 12 months. It lost its luster as fears of interest rate hikes, regulatory headwinds, and competition from stablecoins drove investors toward more conservative investments.
Does that pullback make XRP one of the best cryptocurrencies to buy right now? Or will it sink even lower as it fails to resolve its most pressing issues?
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The bulls vs. the bears
The founders of Ripple, a provider of blockchain-based money transfers, launched XRP in 2012. They minted XRP’s entire supply of 100 billion tokens before its market debut. By early 2018, XRP reached a record high of $3.84 per token. Today, it trades at about $1.
XRP is mainly used as a bridge currency for fiat currencies on Ripple. That process was much faster and cheaper than conventional SWIFT transfers.
XRP’s biggest challenge was a lawsuit from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which was triggered in 2020 by Ripple’s sales of XRP tokens to fund its own business. The SEC accused Ripple of selling XRP as an unlicensed security, and that clash led the top cryptocurrency exchanges to delist XRP. Ripple also lost several of its top customers. That lawsuit finally concluded in 2025 with a lighter-than-expected fine against Ripple, and a ruling that XRP wasn’t an unlicensed security when sold to retail investors.
The top crypto exchanges subsequently relisted XRP, the SEC approved its first spot price exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) even conditionally approved Ripple’s application for a U.S. banking license. It was also used in pilots in Japan and Southeast Asia to settle cross-border transactions at cheaper rates than SWIFT…
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