Key Takeaways
- XRP lawsuit dropped overnight by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
- US policy makers have committed to further efforts to reduce restrictive economic policies.
- Chart of the week: Exploring US interest rates projections from policy makers, what are they expecting by the end of 2025
A flurry of positive news has propelled the market to the upside as we head into the back end of the week. The key piece here is confirmation that the SEC will drop its four-year case against Ripple Labs, the company behind XRP. To nobody’s surprise, XRP is one of today’s top performers, surging as much as +11% in the last day. More on this below.
We have also seen key interest rate news land overnight, a potentially positive tailwind for crypto leading into the second quarter of 2025.
XRP case dropped
For context, this case kicked off in 2020, when the SEC sued Ripple, alleging that its sale of XRP violated securities laws. Basically, the SEC was arguing that Ripple operates like a company, and XRP functions like its shares, meaning it should have been registered as a security. However, that court battle has now ended, in no small part on the back of Trump’s appointment of acting chair of the SEC, and pro-crypto republican, Mark Uyeda.
In other positive news for XRP holders, the current 3rd biggest crypto asset is among other assets a contender to be the next digital asset available through an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) in the US. At the time of writing, there are 9 issuers with registered XRP ETF applications with the SEC.
Releasing economic pressure
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is responsible for shaping economic policies in the US. They use key data points of inflation, economic growth and job market trends to ensure the US economy has a solid foundation.
Since the rise of inflation post-covid, the FOMC’s agenda has largely been to curb it. So far, they’ve been tackling inflation by increasing interest rates (now lowering since 2024) and additional measures that either restrict or remove the availability of money in circulation, this is often referred to as quantitative tightening (QT). One of these measures has been balance sheet rundowns, in which we saw a change in stance overnight.
Balance sheet rundown is a policy that looks to remove cash out of the economy, one way this can be achieved is by the government selling down bonds and not issuing new bonds when maturing bonds expire.
While we haven’t seen interest rates budge overnight, policymakers have acknowledged that markets are getting tighter, and as a result will be only removing US$5b monthly from Bond markets that mature, instead of the current US$25b monthly cap. This change will be in effect as of April.
Click here for a view of the statement.
Chart of the week – Forecasts for Interest Rates in the US
As we’ve discussed above, interest rates are a crucial element of economic policy that dictates what is the current and future availability of money. Lower rates have paved the way for more cash/liquidity and that has historically created ideal conditions for crypto market performance.
CME released a graphic showing where committee members of the FOMC see rates landing by the end of each year, based on forecasting analysis and data. Â
What we can take away is that even in this period of unknown, there is a consensus that rates will drop likely to sub 4% in the US and lower each successive year.
Should we see this interest rate trend play out, we can expect liquidity to rise.
💱 Swyftx Flows
The buy-to-sell ratio for unique Swyftx orders is nominally >$20,000 AUD (rolling data over the last 7 days, captured at 09:00 am AEST).
 
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