Filed 30 December 2020; lightly updated August 2026 with a pointer to what happened later. We are not rewriting the week as if we knew the 2023 court outcome at the time.
Coinbase said it would suspend trading of XRP pairs after the US SEC sued Ripple Labs. Trading went limit-only from 28 December 2020, with a full halt slated for 19 January 2021. The exchange said customers could still deposit and withdraw XRP — a reminder that “delisted from the order book” is not always “the coins vanished”.
What that distinction is for
An exchange can stop matching buyers and sellers and still let you move an asset out, or it can freeze both. Read the notice. If you needed to leave, a withdrawal is a blockchain transaction, not a tweet.
Later, not in this week’s story
In 2023 a US court drew a line between some institutional sales and programmatic exchange sales of XRP. That ruling is a separate article. It does not change what Coinbase announced in December 2020. For the name collision of Ripple versus XRP, see the explainer.
