XRP returns to 3rd-largest crypto after 4-year battle with SEC
2024-12-02

XRP, the cryptocurrency developed and issued by the United States blockchain firm Ripple, has made a historic comeback as the third-largest coin by market capitalization, sparking reactions from the community.
XRP XRPUSD dropped out of the top three cryptocurrencies by market cap in December 2020 as the US Securities and Exchange Commission sued Ripple on allegations of facilitating an “unregistered digital asset securities offering.”
With the SEC’s lawsuit nearing resolution and Ripple achieving several legal victories in 2024, XRP has rallied, posting a massive spike in November after Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election.
After lagging behind Tether’s stablecoin, USDt (USDT), Binance’s BNB (BNB), Solana (SOL) and Circle’s USD Coin (USDC) for years, XRP is now the third largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH).
“This is how it looked before Dec. 22, 2020,” pro-XRP lawyer John Deaton wrote on X.
Four years as the seventh-biggest coin
When the SEC sued Ripple in December 2020, the price fell from around $0.50 to $0.17, wiping off more than $15 billion in market value, Fox Business reporter Eleanor Terrett said in an X post on Dec. 1, 2024.
“While the price recovered, XRP spent the next four years at the #7 spot,” Terrett added.
“The fact that it never fell out of the top 10 said a lot,” one commentator noted.
XRP is now more popular than crypto: Google Trends
Amid a massive XRP breakout in November, the cryptocurrency has made waves on the web, with XRP-related Google searches spiking above those related to “crypto.”
According to data from Google Trends, the number of “XRP” searches broke above “crypto” searches on Google at least three times in November.
The current metrics also suggest that users continue to search for XRP significantly more than crypto in general at the time of writing.
According to Google Trends, XRP also flipped ETH by Google searches in early November, but the data suggests it has yet to flip Bitcoin.
 Will XRP flip ETH?
At the time of writing, XRP had a long way to go before beating Ether as the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, with ETH market value exceeding XRP by 219%.
According to crypto trader Christopher Jaszczynski, who posts on X under the social media brand name MMCrypto, XRP will flip ETH when its price surges to $7.75.
At the time of writing, XRP is trading at $2.35, up 24% over the past 24 hours. Since Nov. 1, the XRP price jumped 341%, with annual returns of roughly 280%.
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