Nearly five years after the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Ripple Labs with conducting an unregistered securities offering, the XRP lawsuit is quiet once again. The hush has prompted a fresh round of conjecture on X, but interviews and public statements by two veteran securities lawyers—Australian solicitor Bill Morgan and former SEC San Francisco Regional Director Marc Fagel—offer a straightforward procedural explanation: the Commission has not yet completed the internal vote required to abandon its own appeal.
When Will The Quiet End In The XRP Lawsuit?
Ripple scored a partial victory in July 2023 when US District Judge Analisa Torres found that programmatic sales of XRP on exchanges did not constitute securities transactions, while institutional sales did. Both sides noticed appeals in October 2024. Ripple withdrew its cross-appeal in June 2025 and has already placed the agreed-upon $125 million civil penalty in escrow, but the SEC’s appeal remains technically alive, leaving the judgment non-final and the injunction in place.
The agency’s posture toward crypto changed sharply after President Donald Trump elevated former commissioner Paul Atkins to the chair earlier this year. “We will make sure the next chapter of financial innovation is written right here in America,” Atkins declared in an August 4 X post unveiling “Project Crypto,” a commission-wide rulemaking agenda to replace the prior regulation-by-enforcement strategy. His broader regulatory détente has fueled hopes that the Commission will simply drop the XRP lawsuit and cement Judge Torres’s retail-market ruling as binding precedent.
Against that backdrop, pro-XRP lawyer Bill Morgan asked his followers whether Atkins “can actually get the SEC commissioners to vote to dismiss the Appeal … and his SEC attorneys to file papers dismissing the Appeal.” Morgan noted, “No, conspiracy. But let’s just have them get it done.” He points to August 15 as “a procedural checkpoint” when both sides must file a joint status report with the Second Circuit. “I hope we will have an update soon on or before 08/15,” he writes.
Marc Fagel, who spent two decades inside the agency and now lectures at Stanford Law School, responded that the case is stalled on a single mechanical step: “There was a (very small) chance the original approval vote encompassed dismissal even without the modification of the injunctive order. Given the delay, seems pretty clear that was not the case, so we’re presumably still waiting on another vote.”
Fagel further explained on X that the prior Commission, during failed settlement talks this spring, did authorize dismissal in principle, but only contingent on modifications to the proposed injunctive order. “They already voted to do this (in the context of the failed settlement) before Atkins even arrived. So it seems pretty obvious where this is going. They just have to get through the standard internal approval process,” Fagel noted.
Because Judge Torres rejected the negotiated injunction, a second formal vote appears to be necessary. Contrary to social-media speculation, the Senate’s August recess and the still-pending CLARITY Act have no bearing on that purely administrative process. As Fagel put it, “They will file to dismiss as soon as the commissioners vote to do so.”
What Happens On—Or After—15 August
The upcoming status report is not a hard deadline to abandon the appeal; it merely obliges each party to declare whether further briefing is necessary. If the SEC remains divided—or if staff review drags—the agency can seek another sixty-day extension. Yet insiders see little appetite for prolonging a fight that the new chair has publicly framed as regulatory overreach.
Should the Commission vote in the coming days, dismissal notices would be filed almost immediately. That would lift the injunction, release the $125 million penalty to the US Treasury, and end the one remaining appeal that prevents XRP’s legal status from crystallizing.
At press time, XRP traded at $3.02.
