Court Declares XRP Sale Not a New Offering – Ripple Wins Again

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Key Highlights

  • A federal court, with the gravity of a man weighing a harvest in silence, dismissed investor Bradley Sostack’s petition against Ripple.
  • The court held that XRP sales in 2017 were not a separate offering, merely another note in the same weathered ledger.
  • The decision comes on the heels of Ripple’s settlement with the SEC, closing yet another stubborn chapter in the annals of XRP litigation.

In the plain-spoken economy of law where dates and signatures are the coins by which truth is measured, a U.S. federal appeals court spoke thus to the world: the case against Ripple, brought by Bradley Sostack, had arrived too late to trouble the district’s peace. The arena of securities law, vast as a Russian winter and patient as a factory clock, had no room for this petition to germinate into a claim. The judge’s decision was not a trumpet call of triumph, but the quiet observation that time, like a diligent serf, had already done its work.

In a filing that read as if penned by men who have learned to live with calendar pages, the Ninth Circuit insisted that Ripple began offering XRP to the public in 2013, and that U.S. law allows such claims only within three years. It declared further that XRP sales in 2017 were not a separate offering but a continuation of the original act of selling, as if a single long winter had merely yielded new snows without creating a new season. Thus, Ripple need not answer to federal securities claims for this particular investor’s grievance.

Investor lawsuit dismissed for being late

Sostack’s complaint arrived in 2019, six years after the first public sale of XRP. He argued, with the stubborn tenacity of a man who believes his ledger is forever imperfect, that the monthly XRP sales from Ripple’s escrow account should be counted as ongoing offerings. The court, seasoned by many winters of jurisprudence, declined to count this argument as snowdrift on the path of justice. It judged that the 2017 XRP sales were part of the 2013 offering and did not reset the three-year period within which such claims must be brought.

XRP came into being in 2012 through the XRP Ledger, a creation that reads like a stubborn fable of numbers: Ripple Labs received eighty billion of the hundred billion tokens that were spawned. The ledger, that curious instrument which might be called a public theater of tokens, showed itself to the world in 2012 or early 2013. In 2017, Ripple began releasing one billion XRP each month from its immense store. Thousands of participants bought XRP, some through the ledger’s built-in exchange, others by simple curiosity. Sostack contended that these later sales rendered XRP a continuing offering; the court, with the gentle irony that marks many a long debate, disagreed. All XRP remained the same, a single stock of grain, and thus part of the original harvest.

Another legal win for Ripple

This is another marked victory for Ripple, appearing like a calm village after a storm. It follows the firm’s settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in August 2025, which ended a protracted legal quarrel that stretched nearly five years. The commission had accused Ripple of raising about $1.3 billion by selling XRP without registering it as a security. As part of the settlement, Ripple was ordered to pay a $125 million penalty, a sum that was long ago placed in escrow, no doubt weighing like a stone in a distant pocket.

XRP has taken little notice of the courtroom drama. At the time of writing, the token hovers near $1.90. The market, that restless throng, shows only a modest 0.08% dip from the previous day, while trading activity surges by roughly 14%, reaching about $2.39 billion in motion, its market cap standing at roughly $116 billion.

This dismissal stands as another chapter closed in the ongoing conversation about whether XRP is an unregistered security-a topic that has stirred more talk in the crypto world than a tavern on market day. The ledger of the tale continues, but the pages turn with Ripple’s name prominent, and the cosmos, if it is listening, remains as ever indifferent to the fate of a token and the vanity of human lawsuits.

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2026-01-28 23:19