A New York judge has denied Ripple and the SEC’s request to lift an injunction on XRP sales to institutions, keeping a $125 million penalty in place.
XRP slipped 3.5% to $2.12 on Thursday after a New York judge denied Ripple’s and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s joint request to lift an injunction and endorse substantially reduced fines against the company.
The latest ruling upholds the $125 million penalty associated with XRP sales to institutional investors.
In the order, Judge Torres rejected arguments from both Ripple and the SEC to dissolve the injunction and reduce the fine by about 60%, saying they had not provided a strong enough reason to undo a final judgment.
“None of this has changed — and the parties hardly pretend that it has. Nevertheless, they now claim that it is in the public interest to cut the Civil Penalty by sixty percent and vacate the permanent injunction entered less than a year ago,” Torres wrote in the order.
The legal battle dates back to 2020, when the SEC accused Ripple of raising $1.3 billion through XRP sales without proper registration. Previously, the court found that some XRP sales conducted through a blind bidding process might not have violated securities laws, although direct institutional sales were still considered securities, leading to the current fine.
The ruling comes amid an evolving regulatory environment under the Trump administration, with the SEC recently dropping cases against high-profile entities like Binance and Coinbase.
Expanding XRP Beyond XRPL
The court ruling seems to have overshadowed Ripple’s announcement of a new partnership with Wormhole, a cross-chain messaging protocol used by BlackRock and others to move over $60 billion in tokenized assets and stablecoins across more than 35 blockchains since 2020.
In a Thursday announcement, Ripple said the partnership is part of its broader push to expand XRPL’s support for cross-chain asset transfers and applications.
As part of the integration, Wormhole will add support for both the XRPL mainnet and the XRPL EVM sidechain, enabling cross-chain messaging and asset movement in an effort to boost DeFi activity in the XRPL ecosystem.
