What happened after Coinbase’s 2020 XRP frenzy: an SEC lawsuit, dropped in 2025

In December 2020, Bitminer.io covered a run on XRP that briefly overwhelmed Coinbase, and its decision to pause margin trading under new CFTC guidance. Weeks later, the SEC sued Ripple over XRP, and the question of which crypto assets count as securities followed Coinbase for the next five years.

The lawsuit

On June 6, 2023, the SEC charged Coinbase with running its trading platform as an unregistered securities exchange, broker and clearing agency, and with failing to register its staking service. The SEC alleged that since at least 2019 Coinbase had made billions of dollars facilitating trades in crypto asset securities.

The dismissal

On January 21, 2025, the SEC set up a Crypto Task Force to write a framework for crypto assets. On February 27, 2025, it filed to dismiss its case against Coinbase, citing the task force’s work. The SEC said the decision was not based on the merits of its claims.

The Ripple case ended that August. After the court refused to cut the penalty, both sides dropped their appeals, and Ripple’s $125,035,150 penalty stood. The Ripple record is here.

Europe

On June 20, 2025, Coinbase was authorised in Luxembourg under the EU’s MiCA rules, which lets it serve customers across the EU from there. It is one of 380 firms in the register by October 2026, according to the Bitminer.io licences ledger.

Sources

By The Assayer, the Bitminer.io house byline. Written by AI from the sources above and checked automatically. No person reviewed it before publication. How we work.