The crypto industry landscape has been rapidly and drastically changing since Donald Trump won the election on November 5 to become the next US president in 2025, taking over from Biden.
However, the changes have touched not only Bitcoin’s and Ethereum’s prices, sending particularly BTC through the roof. Now, rumors have been going around that the CEO of Ripple Labs Brad Garlinghouse has had a secret meeting with Donald Trump. While sparking heated debates among the cryptocurrency community (with many criticizing Garlinghouse for this move), this may open large prospects for Ripple and its XRP coin.
XRP Finally Hits $1 Over Garlinghouse-Trump Meeting Rumors
While the Ripple CEO has neither confirmed, nor rejected the rumors, the community has split into those who welcomed them and those who began pouring criticism on Garlinghouse over that.
Still, these unconfirmed rumors seem to have given a big boost to the XRP price already, pushing it over the $1 threshold, which is the highest peak since 2021. This price surge has fueled optimism about the potential outcome of Ripple’s legal battle against the US Security and Exchange Commission spearheaded by chairman Gary Gensler which has been going since December 2020. Besides, this seems to have given the XRP community more reasons to believe that in the near future XRP may finally become a legitimate digital asset thanks to Trump’s alleged support.
The aforementioned rumors stem from the alleged connections between Ripple’s lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C., and Trump’s 2024 election campaign where he promised to embrace Bitcoin as a digital asset, creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, and make sensible crypto regulation. He also suggested ideas like using Bitcoin for repaying the US national debt or at least to prevent it from growing higher at the current fast pace.
News reports suggest that Brad Garlinghouse might be making attempts to position XRP as a preferred digital asset to be widely adopted within the US. Some are speculating that Ripple could propose XRP, rather than Bitcoin, to be used as a strategic tool to help the US maintain its position as the leader in the global digital economy. Besides, now that Ripple is preparing to launch its new product – the RLUSD stablecoin – it is not only XRP that may benefit from an alleged future collaboration of Ripple and the Trump administration.
Potential Ripple Victory against SEC Thanks to Trump
Another thing that many in the Ripple community are expecting to see once Trump enters the US president’s office is a pivot that might lead to the Ripple-SEC legal battle finally ending and Ripple coming out as a winner.
The thing is that during his election campaign, and the Bitcoin conference in Nashville, US, in particular, Trump stated that he would fire the current SEC chairman Gensler on day one of his presidency, as was reported by CoinTelegraph[1]. The Ripple community is waiting to see if that turns out true. Should this indeed happen, this would be a major pivot in the Ripple-SEC case which might give the victory to the blockchain giant. While the case against Ripple was initiated by Jay Clayton on his last day as the SEC chair, Gensler did not only continue this case but he also started a grand witch-hunt against crypto exchanges and altcoins in the US jurisdiction, claiming alts to be unregistered securities, and accusing exchanges of trading them illegally.
In July last year, Ripple scored a partial victory against the SEC as the federal judge ruled that XRP sales on crypto exchanges do not qualify as securities trading. However, XRP sales to financial institutions were deemed as security transactions.
This September, the SEC made an appeal to the US Supreme Court on that year-old ruling regarding XRP sales in secondary markets.
Despite Ripple having legal issues in the US thanks to the SEC, in Asia and the Middle East, it has scored multiple new partnerships and landed a large number of new customers, which are using both XRP and RippleNet for cross-border payment solutions.
Ripple’s Growth Prospects Under Trump
The rumor of the potential collaboration between Ripple and Donald Trump has added to the XRP’s bullish narrative. The future US president is a former businessman who is well-known for his pro-business and innovation-welcoming policies. Many in the XRP army speculate that he might see XRP and RLUSD to be more promising tools to oppose China’s growing dominance in the blockchain sphere and in digital finance now that China has been actively testing digital yuan for several years now.
The fact that XRP price is not that much vulnerable to volatility unlike Bitcoin’s and XRP’s high speed and low cost for cross-border transfers may interest Trump as a future federally endorsed digital asset for international settlements. Should this indeed happen, the XRP price is likely to skyrocket to new highs: $2 as the nearest potential goal.
