Historical replay · XRP/USD
XRP's SEC Ruling Spike (July 2023)
A single court ruling sent XRP up nearly 100% in under four hours on July 13, 2023, as a federal judge found that XRP itself is not necessarily a security — one of the sharpest single-day legal-news reactions crypto has seen.
Ripple Labs had been fighting an SEC lawsuit since December 2020 over whether XRP itself constitutes an unregistered security. On July 13, 2023, Judge Analisa Torres issued a partial summary judgment: XRP sold programmatically on exchanges to retail buyers was not, in that context, an investment contract — though sales made directly to institutional investors were found to violate securities law. The market reacted to the retail-favorable half of that split ruling almost instantly.
XRP traded near $0.4733 in the 15 minutes before the ruling broke, then spiked as high as $0.938 by roughly 18:15 UTC that same day — an intraday gain of close to 100% in under four hours, on volume far above its recent average, as traders and algorithms reacted to the ruling in real time.
The move gave back a meaningful chunk of that spike almost as quickly as it arrived: XRP settled closer to $0.81 by the end of the day, still up roughly 70% from its pre-ruling level but well off the intraday peak, a pattern typical of news-driven spikes where the initial reaction overshoots before finding a more sustainable level.
The episode is a clean example of how a single, discrete piece of news — not a gradual shift in sentiment or fundamentals — can move an asset more in a few hours than months of ordinary trading, and of how sharply that kind of spike can retrace once the initial reaction settles.