SEC and Ripple moved to end appeals, leaving $125 million judgment intact

The Securities and Exchange Commission and Ripple Labs filed a joint stipulation on August 7, 2025 to dismiss the SEC’s appeal and Ripple’s cross-appeal in one of the cryptocurrency industry’s most closely watched enforcement cases. Bradley Garlinghouse and Christian Larsen joined the filing, which said every party would bear its own costs and fees.

The immediate consequence was narrower than either a complete Ripple victory or an appellate endorsement of the SEC’s position. Abandoning Appeal No. 24-2648 and Cross-Appeal No. 24-2705 left the Southern District of New York’s final judgment in place: a $125,035,150 civil penalty against Ripple and an injunction prohibiting further violations of the Securities Act’s registration provisions. The SEC’s August 7 litigation release described the stipulation as resolving its civil enforcement action.

A disputed ruling escaped appellate review

The SEC sued Ripple, Garlinghouse and Larsen on December 22, 2020, alleging that sales and distributions of XRP amounted to an unregistered digital-asset securities offering. The agency initially alleged that Ripple and the executives had raised more than $1.3 billion through the conduct described in its complaint. That figure was an allegation, not the penalty ultimately imposed.

On July 13, 2023, District Judge Analisa Torres divided the challenged transactions into categories. The court held that Ripple’s institutional XRP sales constituted unregistered offers and sales of investment contracts. It reached a different conclusion for Ripple’s programmatic sales through blind exchange transactions and for certain other distributions, based on the evidentiary record and the Howey investment-contract test.

That distinction became influential in debates over whether securities analysis should attach automatically to a digital token or instead to the circumstances in which it is offered and sold. But the decision did not establish that every exchange trade in XRP—or in any other crypto asset—falls outside securities law. The district court emphasized that its analysis depended on the facts and economic realities of the transactions before it.

By dismissing the appeals, the parties removed the path by which the Second Circuit could have affirmed, reversed or narrowed those holdings. The district court decision remained effective in the Ripple case, but it did not become binding appellate precedent across the circuit.

An attempted penalty reduction had failed

The August 7 filing followed an unsuccessful attempt to revise the final judgment. Under a settlement framework disclosed on May 8, 2025, the parties planned to ask the district court to dissolve the injunction and release the escrowed penalty, with $50 million going to the SEC and the remainder returning to Ripple. They intended to pursue dismissal of the appeals after obtaining that relief.

Judge Torres denied the requested indicative ruling on June 26, 2025. The court found that the parties had not demonstrated exceptional circumstances sufficient to alter the judgment. The August 7 stipulation therefore ended the appellate dispute without implementing the proposed reduction: the injunction and the full $125,035,150 penalty remained.

What the resolution did—and did not—settle

For Ripple, the filing removed the risk that the SEC’s appeal could overturn favorable portions of the 2023 decision. For the SEC, it preserved the institutional-sales violation, injunction and monetary judgment. For exchanges, issuers and token projects, it left a prominent transaction-specific analysis available for citation but denied the market a controlling Second Circuit ruling on the disputed questions.

The verified August 7 record supports a firm conclusion that the parties jointly abandoned their appellate challenges. It does not support broader claims that XRP received universal regulatory clearance, that all secondary-market crypto transactions were deemed non-securities transactions, or that the ruling binds courts outside this case. Those questions remained dependent on transaction structure, evidence, jurisdiction and future judicial or legislative action.