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Is Ripple DeFi's Dark Horse?

Olivia Capozzalo & Camila Russo
August 08, 2025

Happy Friday, Defiers!

Today’s big story:

  • After a 5-year legal battle, Ripple and the SEC have agreed to drop their appeals, closing the case and upholding a judge’s 2023 ruling that institutional sales of XRP were unregistered securities transactions.

In other news:

Read more below! But first, please give our sponsors some love; they make this newsletter possible.

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📈 Markets in the Last 24 Hours

TICKERVALUE24H
BitcoinBitcoin$116,103
-0.45 %
EthereumEthereum$3,958.01
3.26 %
XRPXRP$3.23
5.56 %
BNBBNB$785.66
1.47 %
SolanaSolana$175.85
3.38 %
MessariMessariPortals
MINDSHARE
Rank		MINDSHARE
% Change (7d)
10.06%
13.03%
-28.97%
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Today’s Big Story

Is Ripple DeFi’s Dark Horse?

Ripple is one of the earliest blockchain companies, yet it has rarely been embraced by crypto’s cultural core. Maybe that could change.

To many Ethereum-aligned builders, XRP was the “corporate chain” that played nice with banks and shunned decentralization maximalism. It was the first token retail newcomers stumbled into after seeing its sleek logo on a Coinbase homepage. For years it was believed XRP’s payments network was a relic of the past, where xCurrent, and then xRapid had their glory days in the 2018-2019 era, but fizzled out with the 2020 SEC lawsuit, which scared partners.

But now the legal shackles have just come off, and Ripple could be well-positioned to become a serious hub for stablecoin payments, real-world asset (RWA) tokenization, and even DeFi. The settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission this week could trigger that inflection point.

The SEC’s Long Shadow

Since December 2020, Ripple’s fight with the SEC over whether XRP is an unregistered security has clouded nearly every aspect of its business. The litigation made it harder to secure partnerships in the U.S., limited exchange listings, and pushed Ripple to focus overseas. The mixed court ruling in 2023 was a partial win — retail XRP sales weren’t securities, institutional sales were — but with appeals pending, the case remained an overhang with legal setbacks as recently as June.

That overhang is gone. On Aug. 7, Ripple and the SEC dropped their appeals, cementing the 2023 decision. The company will pay a $125M fine and avoid future institutional sales without registration, but more importantly, it can now execute without a looming court battle. The market’s response was immediate: XRP spiked over 10%.

From Dino Coin to RWA Contender

The legal clarity comes at a moment when Ripple is already mid-pivot into areas the broader crypto industry cares about: Tokenization of real-world assets, stablecoins, and on-chain financial infrastructure.

On the RWA front, activity on the XRP Ledger has exploded this year. Tokenized treasuries, real estate, and fixed-income products are flowing in, driven by partners like Ondo Finance, the Dubai Land Department, and Mercado Bitcoin. XRPL has built-in tokenization and payments rails, plus features like escrow and a native DEX. TVL in XRPL DeFi has jumped more than 70% in a month (though still at the relatively low level of $95M), according to DeFiLLama, and tokenized RWAs have 10x-ed since January to $176M, according to RWA.xyz.

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Then there’s RLUSD, Ripple’s USD-backed stablecoin, which has climbed steadily since its December launch to over $600M in market cap, the 15th largest stablecoin. Ripple is also building the compliance and banking stack to compete behind its stablecoin. The company has applied for a U.S. national banking charter and a Fed master account, named BNY Mellon as custodian, and is positioning RLUSD to meet the stringent MiCA rules in Europe.

The $200M acquisition of Rail, announced a day before the SEC settlement, underlines Ripple’s ambitions. Rail processes roughly 10% of all global stablecoin transactions. Plug that into Ripple’s payment network and RLUSD’s growth, and you have the makings of a serious B2B settlement giant — one that can handle on-chain RWAs, fiat-crypto flows, and cross-border payments through the same infrastructure.

Free to Run

Ripple’s pitch has always been about bridging traditional finance and blockchain. For years, that bridge felt one-way: Ripple going toward the banks. But the combination of a surging RWA sector, stablecoin demand, DeFi rails maturing on XRPL, and now complete regulatory clarity, could flip that dynamic.

It’s still Ripple — centralized governance and token ownership, strong corporate branding, and an L1 that’s not Turing-complete. But the DeFi and RWA markets are moving into a phase where Ripple can aim to make up for those shortcomings with compliance, integrations with TradFi, and institutional trust.

The XRP stereotype was that it’s the coin your uncle buys because it looks official. But now, it could just have the pieces it needs to actually become it. Stranger things have happened in crypto.

With love,

Cami, founder of The Defiant

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