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– XRP gained more than 3% on Friday after Ripple Labs CEO Brad Garlinghouse announced that the company is dropping its counterclaim against the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Highlights:

XRP rate rose after the announcement of the CEO of Ripple to abandon the counter-appeal against the SEC.

A federal court recently denied Ripple and the SEC’s request to reduce the $125 million fine.

Ripple’s lawyers emphasized that XRP’s status as a non-security remains unchanged, easing investor concerns.

Ripple is dropping our cross-appeal and the SEC is expected to drop their appeal as they have previously announced, Garlinghouse said in a post on XRP’s website.

He added that Ripple is now focused on building an internet of value as the company overcomes a protracted legal battle. Following his announcement, XRP jumped 3.36% to $2.18, according to CoinMarketCap.

The move comes just a day after a U.S. District Court denied a joint motion by Ripple and the SEC to enter a tentative order reducing Ripple’s $125 million fine and vacating an order that deemed institutional sales of XRP to be securities transactions.

Judge Analisa Torres wrote that Ripple’s willingness to push the boundaries of the previous summary judgment indicates the likelihood of further violations.

Ripple’s General Counsel Stuart Alderoti commented on the court’s decision, saying that Ripple had two options: drop the appeal or continue to challenge the court’s decision.

He emphasized that regardless of the path chosen, the legal status of XRP as a non-security remains unchanged, assuring investors that Ripple’s business will continue as usual.

The SEC lawsuit, first filed in December 2020, accused Ripple Labs, Garlinghouse and co-founder Chris Larsen of raising $1.3 billion through unregistered sales of XRP in violation of federal securities laws.

Although the court ruled that Ripple’s programmatic sales of XRP were not securities transactions, it ruled that Ripple’s institutional sales were.

Garlinghouse previously called Ripple’s 2024 decision by Judge Torres to impose a $125 million fine – significantly less than the SEC’s original $2 billion demand.

If the SEC withdraws its appeal, it will mark the end of a four-year dispute and possibly remove a serious shadow from XRP’s future in the U.S. market.

RippleX, the development arm of Ripple, has reportedly released version 2.5.0 of the XRP Ledger, introducing several protocol updates aimed at strengthening the functionality and security of the network.

RippleX engineer Mayuha Vadari called the update probably the best change ever released, which makes significant improvements to token management and transaction processing.

XLS-85 modernizes the escrow system by allowing the issuance of tokens by third parties, including stablecoins, and introduces multi-purpose tokens for institutional applications. Another key change, XLS-56, allows wrap transactions, which can combine up to eight steps into a single action, to reduce the failure rate of complex transaction flows and improve network efficiency for advanced use cases.