First published 21 April 2020; rewritten August 2026 and expanded in October 2026. Years of headlines treated a lawsuit, a token, and a company as one object. They are related. They are not the same. This page is a map of the names, plus the two send-screen facts that actually strand people.
The company
Ripple (Ripple Labs) builds software aimed at moving value between financial institutions. It is a firm with staff, investors, and a communications team. It is not a protocol you run at home like Bitcoin. It does not need to sign your payment for XRP to confirm. It does hold a large amount of XRP, and that holding is part of how people argue about control.
A large slice of that holding sits in on-ledger escrow that can unlock on a schedule. Unused amounts have often been put back into escrow. A headline that says a billion XRP “unlocked” is often that schedule, not a surprise sale you have to do something about. Read whether tokens moved to an exchange, or whether the escrow rolled forward. Those are different sentences.
The token and the ledger
XRP is the native asset of the XRP Ledger. You can hold it in a wallet that supports that ledger. Fees on that ledger are paid in XRP and are small by design. The ledger does not use Bitcoin-style mining. Agreement is a vote among validators. Who runs those validators, and how easy it is to join the set that matters, is a real argument about control. It is not settled by calling the asset “decentralised” or “a bank coin” in a caption.
The ledger also requires a small reserve of XRP to keep an account open. The amount has been lowered by amendments over the years. Your wallet should show what it currently requires. That reserve is not a fee you chose, and it is not something a website should ask you to “unlock” by typing your phrase.
Destination tags are the postcode
Many exchanges use one XRP address for every customer. The address gets the coins to the company’s front door. A destination tag — sometimes called a memo — says which customer. Omit it and the coins can sit in a lobby nobody is watching. Fill the tag from that venue’s deposit screen, not from a chat, and not from an old screenshot. A personal wallet that is yours alone often needs no tag. An exchange almost always does. Optional on one venue is required on another. The wrong network is still the wrong city covers the general case. This paragraph is the XRP-shaped injury.
XRP addresses are not Bitcoin addresses and not Ethereum addresses. A multi-coin wallet will let you pick the wrong ledger. If the deposit page says XRP Ledger, that is the only notebook that will arrive.
RippleNet
RippleNet was the brand for Ripple’s network of institutional customers. Marketing used to bundle xCurrent, xRapid, and xVia. Those product names have been reshuffled more than once. If a headline says “Ripple is replacing SWIFT”, read the sentence again: a vendor is selling rails to banks. Banks adopt vendors slowly, and they can stop. A bank using Ripple’s software is not the same fact as you holding XRP in a wallet.
The lawsuit ended. The product did not change.
The SEC sued Ripple in December 2020. In July 2023 a New York court split the question: XRP sales to institutional buyers were unregistered securities offerings; programmatic sales on exchanges were not, in that court’s view. In August 2024 the same court entered a final judgment: a civil penalty of $125,035,150 against Ripple, and an injunction against Ripple violating the registration rules. On 7 August 2025 the SEC and Ripple dismissed their appeals. The judgment stays. The appeals ending is not a new statute, and it is not a ruling that every sale of XRP, everywhere, is or is not a security.
Coinbase’s December 2020 decision to halt XRP trading is a separate news page. A venue delisting a pair is not the ledger stopping. None of these papers is a price oracle.
Hold XRP only if you understand the ledger, the tag, and the custody. This page is a map of names, not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold.
