Comparison to Other SEC Crypto Cases
How SEC v. Ripple relates to the SEC's other major enforcement actions against crypto exchanges and issuers.
SEC v. Ripple was one of several major SEC enforcement actions against crypto companies in the early-to-mid 2020s. Understanding how it relates to the others helps place its significance in context.
SEC v. Coinbase
The SEC brought an enforcement action against Coinbase, one of the largest U.S. crypto exchanges, alleging it operated as an unregistered securities exchange, broker, and clearing agency by listing tokens the SEC considered unregistered securities. Coinbase mounted a vigorous defense, arguing (similar in spirit to Ripple's core defense) that secondary-market trading of tokens on its platform does not meet the Howey test's requirements the way a direct issuer sale would. Following a change in SEC leadership and broader enforcement posture in 2025, the SEC moved to dismiss this case.
SEC v. Binance
The SEC also sued Binance, the world's largest crypto exchange by volume, and its founder, alleging a wide range of securities law violations spanning unregistered securities offerings, commingling of customer funds, and misleading investors — a broader and more serious set of allegations than the Ripple case, which was narrower and focused specifically on the securities-registration question around XRP sales.
SEC v. Kraken
The SEC brought a similar unregistered-exchange enforcement action against Kraken, another major U.S. exchange, generally following the same "operating as an unregistered securities exchange/broker" theory used against Coinbase, rather than the issuer-focused theory used against Ripple.
SEC v. Terraform Labs
The SEC's case against Terraform Labs and founder Do Kwon, following the high-profile 2022 collapse of the Terra/Luna ecosystem, resulted in a federal court finding that certain Terraform tokens did qualify as securities — notably applying a broader view of Howey's "efforts of others" prong to secondary-market sales than Judge Torres applied in the Ripple case, creating a degree of tension between the two rulings that has been widely discussed in legal commentary as an unresolved split among district courts on exactly this question.
Why Ripple's case is often treated as the leading precedent anyway
Despite the Terraform ruling creating some tension, the Ripple case is frequently cited as the more influential precedent specifically for the programmatic exchange sale question, partly because it was among the first major crypto securities cases to reach a substantive ruling on the merits (rather than settling before a ruling, as many earlier crypto enforcement matters did), and partly because its reasoning has since been persuasively cited by other defendants and courts.
The broader pattern: enforcement-by-litigation, then a legislative gap
Taken together, these cases illustrate a broader dynamic in U.S. crypto regulation during this period: in the absence of clear, crypto-specific legislation from Congress, much of the practical legal framework for how crypto assets are treated emerged instead through individual enforcement actions and the case law they produced — an inherently piecemeal, sometimes inconsistent way to establish a regulatory framework, which is part of why ongoing legislative efforts toward clearer market-structure rules (see Global Regulatory Status) have remained a live policy priority.