Ripple (XRP) has now become the fourth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization after Ripple Labs’ partial victory over the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on July 13.
Mere hours after the ruling, XRP market cap surged a whopping $21.2 billion to reach a new yearly high of $46.1 billion, pushing it up from the 7th position to beat out Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) and Binance’s BNB (BNB) token in the process.
At the time of writing, Ripple’s market capitalization has settled down to $42.5 billion.
The sudden surge for XRP came immediately after the District Court for the Southern District of New York declared that the “offer and sale of XRP on digital asset exchanges did not amount to offers and sales of investment contracts” in a case involving Ripple Labs and the SEC.
Similarly, the price of XRP surged as much as 98% in the hours following the decision, reaching as high as $0.93 according to data from TradingView.
Related: Why is XRP price up today?
The apparent rush to buy up XRP even briefly caused U.S. crypto exchange Uphold to go down due to a “simply unprecedented” spike in volume.
“Yes, we went down but no platform could cope with the 50x spike in volume we saw today.”
Uphold is understood to have been one of the few larger U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchanges that had continued to offer sales of XRP, while others chose to delist.
Uphold is back up!
Yes, we went down but no platform could cope with the 50x spike in volume we saw today.
Uphold feels proud and vindicated to have been THE ONLY platform to stick with XRP through thick and thin over the past few years.
We’d love to give props to our law firm…
— Uphold (@UpholdInc) July 13, 2023
The new ruling has also sparked a fresh wave of re-listing activity from mainstay U.S. exchanges, with Coinbase, Kraken and iTrustCapital making the token available for trading on their respective platforms.
The Winklevoss-owned crypto exchange Gemini has hinted that it too will look to re-list XRP sometime in the near future.
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