Ripple has despatched a brand new market-structure letter to the SEC’s Crypto Job Power, urging the company to attract a tough line between a securities providing and the underlying token which will later commerce in secondary markets, a framing that might matter for the way XRP (submit SEC lawsuit) and different tokens are handled in disclosure and jurisdiction debates.
Within the January 9, 2026 submission, signed by Chief Authorized Officer Stuart Alderoty, Basic Counsel Sameer Dhond, and Deputy Basic Counsel Deborah McCrimmon, Ripple positions its feedback as enter to ongoing Fee rulemaking or steering, explicitly tying its argument to parallel legislative efforts on Capitol Hill.
The corporate references earlier letters from March 21, 2025 and Could 27, 2025, and factors to the Home’s CLARITY Act of 2025 and Senate dialogue drafts as proof that classification selections will cascade into “jurisdiction, disclosures, and secondary-market remedy.”
Ripple Presses SEC To Cement XRP’s Put up-Lawsuit Standing
Ripple’s core thesis is that regulators ought to transfer away from “decentralization” as a authorized metric as a result of it’s “not a binary state” and creates “insupportable uncertainty,” together with each “false damaging” and “false constructive” outcomes.
Considered one of Ripple’s key issues is that an asset may very well be handled as caught in a securities regime just because an entity nonetheless holds stock or continues contributing to growth, some extent with apparent parallels to Ripple. The corporate nonetheless holds a big chunk of all XRP of their escrow whereas developer arm RippleX contributes closely to the event of the XRP Ledger.
As an alternative, Ripple pushes the SEC to floor jurisdiction in “authorized rights and obligations,” emphasizing enforceable guarantees relatively than market narratives about ongoing efforts. The letter argues that regulatory theories specializing in “efforts of others” danger collapsing the multi-part Howey evaluation right into a single issue and, in Ripple’s view, sweeping too broadly.
Essentially the most consequential part is Ripple’s argument that the SEC’s jurisdiction ought to be time-bound to the “lifespan of the duty,” relatively than treating the asset as completely labeled. In a passage that goes on to secondary-market implications, Ripple writes:
“The Fee’s jurisdiction ought to observe the lifespan of the duty; regulating the ‘promise’ whereas it exists, however liberating the ‘asset’ as soon as that promise is fulfilled or in any other case ends. The dispositive issue is the holder’s authorized rights, not their financial hopes. With out that brilliant line, the definition of a safety, and the SEC’s jurisdictional limits, grow to be amorphous and unbounded.”
That framing issues for XRP and attracts parallels to the SEC lawsuit: whether or not secondary-market buying and selling of a token can stay topic to securities-law oversight lengthy after any preliminary distribution, advertising and marketing, or development-era statements. Ripple explicitly rejects the concept that lively secondary buying and selling is itself a jurisdictional hook, evaluating high-velocity crypto markets to identify commodities like gold and silver and even secondary markets for client gadgets.
Ripple additionally spends significant time on the “capital elevating” boundary, arguing for privity as a brilliant line that distinguishes main distributions from trade buying and selling the place counterparties are unknown and the issuer is “merely as one other market actor.”
In that context, the letter warns that treating each issuer sale as a perpetual capital increase creates “perverse outcomes,” together with what it calls a “Zombie Promise” and “Operational Paralysis”: language that, whereas generalized, clearly speaks to issues round issuer-held token inventories and the compliance burdens that might connect to treasury administration and gross sales practices.
Individually, Ripple endorses “fit-for function” disclosures in circumstances the place securities regulation is definitely warranted, relatively than forcing “full company registration designed for conventional fairness.” For XRP holders and market members, that could be a directional sign: Ripple is arguing for a regime the place disclosure triggers connect to particular guarantees or particular types of ongoing management, to not the token as an object indefinitely.
The timing can also be notable. Ripple dated the letter January 9, 2026, lower than every week earlier than a January 15 markup on complete digital-asset market construction laws within the US Senate Banking Committee, an approaching deadline that might form how classification language, jurisdictional traces, and disclosure ideas harden into legislative textual content.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.05.
Featured picture created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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