XRP vs. SWIFT: Why Ripple’s Courtroom Decision Could Be SWIFT’s Next Big Problem

• Ripple’s legal settlement with the SEC clears XRP for broader institutional use in secondary markets.
• XRP’s On-Demand Liquidity service challenges SWIFT by enabling faster and cheaper cross-border payments.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) legal standoff with Ripple in 2025 has extended a multi-year settlement, likely beginning the path to more competitive cross-border payment services between SWIFT and XRP.

The resolution will eliminate one of the largest barriers to the institutional strategy of Ripple, which may further hasten its drive to become a global financial infrastructure.

The SEC case, filed in 2020, accused Ripple of selling XRP as unregistered securities. The case led to the U.S. exchange delisting, interrupted bank liaisons, and years of minimal growth in regulated markets.

In a partial court decision in 2023, institutional sales were classified as securities, but retail programmatic sales were not. The settlement of the case in May 2025 demanded that Ripple pay $50 million and terminated all the appeals. This decision made the legal status of XRP clear in regard to secondary market trading, which minimized the regulatory risk that had limited the adoption.

Industry stakeholders, such as former SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, have cited the settlement as a pivot, claiming such a move will compel regulators to put more concise rules around digital assets. The lifted compliance cloud has also freed up Ripple to seek out institutional use cases more ambitiously, including those currently dominated by SWIFT.

XRP’s Institutional Edge in Cross-Border Payments

Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) service enables the repayment of international transactions without having pre-funded foreign accounts at banks. The XRP Ledger enables transactions that usually take days to settle through SWIFT to be settled in seconds, reducing the cost and unleashing stranded capital.

By mid-2025, the Ripple payment network was already operating in high-volume remittance corridors in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

UnionBank in the Philippines is integrating ODL as a channel to wire funds across international borders, Travelex Bank Brazil plans to use XRP to avoid the pre-funding of liquidity, and LuLu Exchange in the UAE is tapping Ripple’s infrastructure to route flows to APAC. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has estimated that XRP may manage up to 14% of SWIFT transactions in five years.

Expanding Beyond Payments: Tokenization, Stablecoins, and Trading

Ripple has expanded its approach beyond remittance. Real-world assets are also being tokenized on the XRP Ledger, including real estate title deeds with the Dubai Land Department through to the U.S. Treasuries via the RLUSD stablecoin.

The RLUSD is 1:1-pegged to the U.S. dollar, enabling the settling of institutional transactions with a regulated settlement and supporting the liquidity functions of XRP.

Its 2025 acquisition of prime broker Hidden Road for $1.25 billion provides Ripple with a client base that annually clears more than $3 trillion in the FX, crypto, and derivatives markets. The transition further integrates Ripple into institutional trade settlement and custody markets, which makes the wider applicability more than just payments.

With the CBDC platform already under test in several jurisdictions, Ripple makes XRP a prospective bridge asset across national digital currencies. Although CBDCs on the private ledger used by Ripple do not need the XRP token, cross-border interoperability will be a major long-term opportunity.

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