When Charles Hoskinson and others in the crypto space talk about operating with regulatory clarity today, one name rarely gets the credit it deserves: Ripple.
That is the argument analyst Bradley Kimes made in a recent podcast, and it is starting to cut through as new money flows into crypto and asks the obvious question — how did we get here?
The Fight Most People Have Already Forgotten
The SEC versus Ripple case did not end quietly. It ended after years of litigation, and somewhere between $150 and $200 million was spent by Ripple defending its position. Brad Garlinghouse and Chris Larsen could have walked away earlier. A settlement was available. They chose not to take it.
“Ripple, Brad Garlinghouse, and Chris Larsen could have gotten out of that case much earlier if they were just worried about themselves,” Kimes said. “They could have gotten out free and clear. They chose to stay in for the longer fight for the betterment of the entire space.”
That fight produced something no other crypto project has: a court-tested legal position on token classification, won through litigation rather than granted through lobbying. The clarity that followed did not appear by accident. Someone paid for it.
$13 Trillion Waiting for a Switch to Flip
Kimes frames the current market as a holding pattern. Institutional money is present but not fully deployed. It is, in his words, “sitting on the sidelines” waiting for the Clarity Act to advance through the Senate before making deeper commitments to the projects and infrastructure it already believes in.
The numbers he points to are significant. Around $13 trillion in annual transactional volume tied to GTreasury operations, plus additional multi-trillion flows through Ripple Prime, formerly Hidden Road. None of it, he says, currently runs on blockchain rails.
“That’s a $13 trillion light switch just waiting to go.”
He argues that once regulatory clarity arrives, those flows do not gradually migrate. They move fast. Companies are already sitting on prepared announcements and product launches, fingers on the press release button, waiting for the moment the framework is confirmed.
Why Ripple Is Already Inside the Room
What separates Ripple from most of the projects that will benefit from the Clarity Act, according to Kimes, is that Ripple is not waiting to be let in. It is already inside regulated financial conversations, already past the classification hurdles that others are still navigating, and already connected to the institutional infrastructure that will need to move first.
XRP’s commodity designation, he says, removes constraints that earlier created uncertainty around token holdings and institutional participation. The legal groundwork is done. The regulatory groundwork is nearly done. What remains is the moment the switch flips.