Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse stated that Ripple was almost closed in December 2020 as a result of a US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) indictment. The company's leadership had given serious consideration to the dissolution of the business and had even proposed that XRP holdings should be distributed to shareholders, indicating to the regulator that Ripple no longer owned the XRP. However, Garlinghouse and co-founder Chris Larsen chose to confront SEC in court.
Garlinghouse stated that the closure of the company would result in hundreds of employees being unemployed and allow the SEC to win without challenging its legal arguments. Ripple felt that the case would affect the wider encryption industry and decided to defend himself rather than abandon it. Despite significant pressures during the proceedings, Ripple continues to expand globally, adding new payment partners, developing enterprise block chain operations and investing in infrastructure in the fight against SEC.
The SEC case was fully resolved in August last year, with Ripple re-establishing operations in the United States, obtaining licences from several jurisdictions, expanding institutional cooperation, introducing RLUSD stabilization coins and strengthening its position in the field of monetization and cross-border payments. Xaif Cripto states that Ripple's recovery shows how the market narratives are changing rapidly. Companies that were considered to have ended are now re-engineered as leaders in the institutional block chain, and a growing number of banks and financial institutions are exploring the potential of their technologies for real-life financial applications.
For Garlinghouse, the choice of protest over abandonment is a defining moment in Ripple's history. This event, which was considered the last chapter of the company, eventually became one of the most important legal victories in the encryption industry, consolidating Ripple ' s resilience and laying the foundation for its next stage of growth.