Ripple went all-in on politics this year — and it paid off spectacularly. The oldest, most experienced, and wealthiest altcoin-focused company, Ripple’s multi-year initial coin offering (ICO) started in February 2013 and ultimately raised $1.3 billion — a breathtaking sum during crypto’s early years.

Three of the project’s co-founders, Chris Larsen, Brad Garlinghouse, and Jed McCaleb, are now billionaires and the market cap of its flagship XRP token is up $88 billion year-to-date.

Working in the industry for over a decade, its leaders have learned what types of activities do and do not make an impact. As one of the world’s first ICOs, they created the playbook for millions of subsequent token offerings and continue to find ways to engage their community of holders.

In 2024, the correct choice was prioritizing politics.

Millions in politics donations for billions in crypto gains

In the five weeks since the US election, XRP has quadrupled from $0.50 to over $2. On a national TV broadcast, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse celebrated his political efforts that culminated in victories on November 5.

Reporters at 60 Minutes interviewed Garlinghouse where he highlighted the digital asset industry’s influence on US policy-makers. During the 2024 election, 60 Minutes revealed, crypto companies donated one-third of all direct corporate contributions to super PACs.

Those crypto donations worked. An overwhelming 85% of the 33 lawmakers who received donations from crypto super PACs won their election to Congress.

Ripple executives were marquee donors. Garlinghouse donated $44 million to political candidates with friendly stances toward digital assets, including $25 million to Fairshake, a crypto super PAC. Fairshake said it would use the money to onboard more attorneys to offer pro bono services and promote financial and crypto literacy.

Ripple co-founder Larsen donated $5 million to Greenpeace’s virtue-signaling push for Bitcoin to switch its algorithm from proof-of-work to a new, more eco-friendly algorithm. Even though Larsen knew the network would never initiate such a change, his philanthropic support for the environment signaled support to democratic policymakers.

Read more: Ripple exec Chris Larsen donates $250K to up police surveillance in San Francisco

Ripple won’t be leaving politics

Of course, Ripple’s involvement in politics started as early as 2019 when it joined the Blockchain Association, a lobbyist for crypto-friendly regulation. That membership predates the SEC’s unregistered securities lawsuit but could indicate that Ripple’s co-founders were already anticipating attention from regulators.

Garlinghouse and Larsen also routinely associate with Washington DC insiders and regulators. For example, they recently appeared at a fintech conference hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.

In summary, Ripple has learned that being politically active is a savvy technique for long-term success in crypto. And token holders have reaped the rewards.

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Assets listed on South Korean exchanges, including cryptocurrencies like bitcoin (BTC) and XRP, tanked on Tuesday night after President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law for the first time since 1979.

Traditional assets like equities, along with the Korean won (KRW), also cratered as tanks rolled down the streets of Seoul to protect government buildings.

As the KRW crashed to its weakest exchange rate against the dollar in 15 years, Seoul-based crypto exchanges Upbit and Bithumb struggled to remain operational. Outages affected users intermittently throughout the evening.

Trading volumes in BTC and XRP surged as prices collapsed, sending BTC tumbling 33% intraday on Upbit’s KRW-denominated trading pair.

XRP, the most popular asset traded on Upbit and Bithumb this week, fell an almost unbelievable 56% within 30 minutes on KRW pairs.

Read more: XRP craze in South Korea reminds traders of LUNA meltdown

A chaotic day for South Korean crypto traders

President Yoon’s order suspended all political activities for approximately three hours until opposition lawmakers raced into an emergency parliamentary session to vote on a lift of martial law.

After some clashes between police and protesters outside the National Assembly building, the finance ministry pledged “unlimited liquidity” to the market, leading the KRW and other Korean assets to pare their losses.

Samsung, the multi-hundred-billion-dollar electronics giant, fell by over 7% in London trading before regaining confidence after the finance ministry’s commitment. The KRW, which had traded nearly 3% lower in FX markets abroad, recouped half of those losses.

South Korea’s constitution demands the president comply with a National Assembly vote to lift martial law. According to a translated excerpt of the constitution, “When the National Assembly requests the lifting of martial law with the concurrent vote of a majority of the total members of the National Assembly, the President shall comply.”

Nevertheless, it’s unclear if President Yoon will actually follow the constitution.

During the late-night session, 190 parliamentarians voted unanimously to lift martial law. As of 1pm in New York (3am in Seoul), however, Yoon and his military hadn’t responded to the vote.

Globally, the price of BTC is relatively unchanged over the last 24 hours. The smaller XRP is still trading 6% lower in global averages.

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Amid a cryptocurrency bull run, Ripple (XRP) has surged in price to $2.67 at press time and briefly enjoyed a market cap greater than 88% of the stocks in the S&P 500 today.

In the past seven days, XRP’s market cap has more than doubled in size from $75.3 billion on November 26 to $158.5 billion today, overtaking Solana and Tether by market cap. According to Stock Analysis, this ranked XRP 61st out of 503 stocks in the S&P 500 — outperforming a whopping 88% of them.

XRP’s market cap was just above the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock ($BLK at $158 billion) and ride-share giant Uber ($UBER at $154 billion).

Read more: CHART: Dogecoin market cap now greater than 60% of S&P 500

Though its market cap has slightly fallen to $153 billion at press time, XRP is still outperforming Peter Thiel’s Palantir ($PLTR at $151 billion), biotech corporation Pfizer ($PFE at $146 billion), banking behemoth Citigroup ($C at $136B), and defense contractor Lockheed Martin ($LMT at $123 billion).

XRP officially reached a new market cap all-time-high (ATH) at $158.5 billion. The last time it came anywhere close was on the tail of bitcoin’s bull run in late 2017; its previous peak was $131.7 billion on January 7, 2018.

This latest XRP pump has been attributed to several potential factors, including news that hints at a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Speculation that Elon Musk may soon invest in XRP is also a likely contributing factor, along with new partnerships and a potential XRP ETF.

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XRP Army, the social media fan club for all things Ripple, is alive and well in South Korea. Seoul-based crypto exchange Upbit reported that XRP traders on its platform are more active than traders of any other crypto asset this week — trading even more than bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH).

With over $6 billion in XRP traded, Ripple’s blockchain asset was responsible for over one-third of the crypto exchange’s $18 billion total on Monday.

That South Korea — a relatively small country — is leading a rally in a major cryptocurrency is unremarkable for veterans who have been around since 2017.

Back then, South Korea attracted international crypto arbitrageurs to its ‘kimchi premium,’ the phenomenon that for many months, saw BTC traded at a premium in the country versus exchanges in other regions.

On Monday, and for a few hours over the weekend, XRP denominated in South Korean won (KRW) traded at a slight, single-digit percentage premium versus the global average. Although its premium fluctuated intermittently and is back to parity as of publication time, high demand in South Korea indicated a possible resurgence of a kimchi premium that had not been seen for years.

For one glorious day, Upbit overtook Coinbase price leadership

On December 2, XRP’s price leadership passed from Coinbase to Upbit, and its price in KRW led Coinbase’s price for approximately a day.

XRP has been particularly volatile recently. After more than 400% gains within the last four weeks, some mispricings around the world are certainly to be expected.

On most other major exchanges like Coinbase or Binance, BTC typically has the highest trading volume. However, today, BTC is ranked tenth by trading volume on Seoul-based Upbit.

South Korean Ajummas win big on XRP

XRP’s $150 billion market capitalization ranks among the largest public companies with a primary stock listing in South Korea. Although smaller than Samsung, XRP is larger than Hyundai or Kia. (Of course, the XRP Ledger does not have a headquarters, and most of Ripple’s founders are from California, not Seoul.)

After XRP’s quadrupling over the past four weeks, South Korean media is praising a group known as the Ajummas. Ajumma is a kind of South Korean equivalent of the “Jones” surname that references a stereotypical couple living out a successful American Dream.

Unlike the quintessentially hard-working Mr. and Mrs. Jones, however, South Korean Ajummas are more akin to Japan’s Mrs. Watanabe, a group of stay-at-home housewives-turned-savvy investors.

In Japan, the Mrs. Watanabe class discovered low-cost funding for an immensely profitable yen-USD carry trade. In South Korea, Ajummas have apparently discovered crypto.

Supercharged with gains like XRP’s 400% in one month, Ajummas are outperforming their Japanese counterparts in spades.

XRP has quadrupled within a month and climbed crypto leaderboards with olympic speed, now ranking third worldwide. It has surpassed tether (USDT), Binance Coin (BNB), and Solana (SOL) in size, and is third only to BTC and ETH.

XRP Army tallies its winnings

News flow for XRP has been positive in recent weeks. XRP leaders recently launched a stablecoin and real-world asset (RWA) platform and Ripple secured a partial victory in its widely misinterpreted SEC lawsuit. Its founders also embraced lobbying and donated millions to political campaigns.

Large asset managers like WisdomTree, Bitwise, and Canary Capital have filed S-1 applications to list spot XRP ETFs on US exchanges. Those applications would have gone nowhere under SEC Chairman Gary Gensler but might have renewed hope under a new 2025 chair in Donald Trump’s incoming administration.

All these successes have paid off. South Koreans who bought XRP at any time in the past except the first week of 2018 are currently in profit.

Read more: SEC wants 2nd Circuit to overrule Ripple XRP decision

Skiddish Ajummas and newfound riches

Although South Korea might be celebrating the XRP bull market high, some cautious Ajummas are already locking in their profits.

Jaded by years of underperformance, South Koreans remain skeptical that XRP has long-term staying power. Some Koreans like Ryan Kim even allege that Ripple was partly responsible for a historical, doomed scheme called Ripple Market Korea. (The involvement of Ripple in this organization is indeterminate.)

Other Koreans remember what happened with Terra LUNA. South Korea turned founder Do Kwon into a national lesson when his crypto project imploded in 2022. Kwon lost investors like the Ajummas untold fortunes as his empire of tens of billions collapsed to near-$0. 

The LUNA collapse was a national story and devastated so many Ajummas that media reports even tied some tragic deaths to the incident.

In South Korea, the name Do Kwon will live in infamy. A South Korean court was first to issue a warrant for his arrest and Kwon physically fled the country, claiming that he moved to Singapore due to concerns about his family’s safety.

After months as an international fugitive, authorities finally arrested him in Montenegro.

Although LUNA has very little to do with XRP, the memory of quick riches and even quicker losses are front-of-mind for the historically conservative Ajummas community.

If XRP cannot hold onto its gains, it could provide even more disappointment to South Koreans still stinging from LUNA’s meltdown two years ago.

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Even after today’s 4% retracement off October’s near-record highs for crypto prices, most major assets have rallied year-to-date. Bitcoin has added 66% to its market capitalization while smaller assets like Dogecoin and BNB have nearly doubled. In fact, every top 10 crypto asset has posted positive or neutral performance in 2024 except one: XRP.

With total crypto market capitalization $680 billion higher than January 1, holders of XRP are disappointed, to say the least. Even troubled stablecoins like tether — with its 19 run-ins with the US government, including a Manhattan US Attorney investigation this month — have performed better than the Ripple-promoted coin.

The pain is even more acute after Ripple partially prevailed in the highest-profile lawsuit in crypto history and earned a ruling from Judge Analisa Torres that many secondary transactions of XRP purchases by retail investors were not securities transactions.

Read more: How New York judge Analisa Torres changed Gary Gensler’s career

Of course, the world’s most powerful and well-staffed securities regulator is asking the prestigious 2nd Circuit to overrule that determination. For a while, though, it seemed like XRP had cleared a major legal hurdle. 

The XRP community also celebrated major scalability upgrades to the XRP Ledger and the launch of its new stablecoin, RLUSD. Prominent banks announced intentions to explore XRPL for cross-border payments. Ripple started tokenizing real-world assets via a partnership with the first Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)-regulated digital asset exchange.

None of it earned XRP more of a bid over its competitors among the top 10. Year-to-date, XRP is down 17% and has shed $5 billion in market capitalization.

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It has been a full year since Protos covered the anticlimactic July 2023 launch of FedNow, the US Federal Reserve’s once-heralded 24/7 instant payments platform and ‘crypto killer.’ 

Needless to say — and despite a 12% overnight loss after a crisis in Japan — FedNow hasn’t killed crypto. Since the service launched, the total market capitalization of crypto has now rallied 59%.

Although the Fed never specifically claimed the service would disrupt anything in the crypto industry, its value propositions overlapped point-by-point with value propositions of blockchains. Specifically, marketing materials promoted FedNow’s 24/7/365 uptime, payment irreversibility, high throughput, zero chargebacks, and ultra-low fees even for large payments.

FedNow might be better than, but did not displace, most crypto assets

At the time, analysts thought the service would decisively disrupt the crypto industry, displacing stablecoins and attracting hundreds of millions of users. FedNow’s transaction fee rivals the most popular blockchains at just $0.23 per transaction, regardless of the size.

Initially, the XRP community latched onto FedNow, thinking that the launch would somehow benefit Ripple’s blockchain. For years, fans marketed XRP Ledger in particular as an interbank transfer and remittance-friendly blockchain.

Nevertheless, XRP has lost a quarter of its value since FedNow’s debut.

Read more: ‘Crypto killer’ FedNow launches, fails to kill crypto

Current statistics indicate that FedNow has onboarded over 900 financial institutions during its first 12 months. However, the Fed has certified only 32 organizations to support payment processing for them.

Mark Gould, chief executive payments officer of Federal Reserve Financial Services admitted, “We’re still early on the road to instant payment ubiquity.”

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The price of Ripple’s XRP briefly jumped 13% on Monday after a fake filing, supposedly from investment firm BlackRock Inc., was posted on an official government website in Delaware.

As reported by Bloomberg, something called the ‘iShares XRP Trust’ appeared on the Delaware Department of State’s Division of Corporations website. The portal is where all investment trusts incorporated in the state are registered.

The news of the filing was quickly shared on social media and the price of XRP duly spiked. However, the filing was quickly outed as a fake by a BlackRock spokesperson, and by the end of the day, the crypto’s price plummeted.

It’s not currently clear who submitted the listing in BlackRock’s name.

According to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst James Seyffart, “This isn’t the best look for the crypto industry and definitely hurts the credibility of the good actors in the space, but it was sniffed out as fake pretty quickly.”

“We saw a similar event last week that turned out to be real for the Ethereum trust. But an XRP ETF filing would be a bit of a stretch at this time,” he added (via Bloomberg).

Another fake fund involving BlackRock

This isn’t the only erroneous media report about a supposedly imminent crypto product involving BlackRock that’s affected markets in the past few weeks.

Nearly $100 million worth of positions were liquidated in October after false reports of an approved spot Bitcoin Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) sent the currency’s price soaring before a hasty correction brought it back to Earth.

Read now: Crypto X keeps getting the Bitcoin ETF wrong

In a now-deleted article, crypto outlet Cointelegraph reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) had approved an iShares spot Bitcoin ETF managed by BlackRock.

Cointelegraph posted on X (formerly Twitter) “BREAKING: SEC APPROVES ISHARES BITCOIN SPOT ETF.” The post was then edited to include the word “REPORTEDLY,” before the outlet deleted it altogether.

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One of the world’s most prestigious exchanges, NASDAQ, has paused its plans to custody digital assets. It had originally filed an application for a limited-purpose trust company with the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). That trust company would have managed its digital asset custodian, however, those plans are no more.

Originally, NASDAQ had planned to test its digital asset custody service starting in March, with a full-service offering by the second quarter of 2023.

This week, NASDAQ CEO Adena Friedman shelved those plans during an earnings call. In making the decision, she considered “the shifting business and regulatory environment in the US.”

SEC partial loss in court upends regulatory stability

The unnamed elephant in the room might have been the surprising, split decision in SEC v. Ripple that interrupted the SEC’s nearly lossless track record in crypto enforcement actions. 

Whereas the SEC’s approach to crypto regulation was clear a few weeks ago — the vast majority of digital assets except bitcoin launched illegally via unregistered securities offerings — a US District Court judge has ruled that Ripple’s Programmatic Sales of XRP on crypto exchanges were, in fact, legal.

(It’s worth noting that the judge explicitly declined to rule on the legality of 99% of XRP trading volume since 2017.)

Although Ripple lost on other, major charges, that particular ruling upended conventional wisdom. It certainly confused NASDAQ. 

While the XRP community erupted in applause for their partial victory — only $728 million of the SEC-charged $1.3 billion in sales of XRP were illegal — Wall Street institutions like NASDAQ hit the pause button to reassess.

Read more: Abolish the SEC! A decade of battling crypto’s top regulator

NASDAQ will continue to work with bitcoin ETFs

Of course, not everything screeched to a halt. Bitcoin itself remains clearly legal, with legal markets for spot and derivatives trading. Indeed, NASDAQ is continuing plans to partner with bitcoin ETF issuers. It recently assisted in the resubmission of Blackrock’s bitcoin ETF application with the SEC to reflect new market surveillance services as well as NASDAQ’s plans to serve as Blackrock’s listing exchange partner.

In addition to Blackrock’s application, the SEC is currently reviewing six other spot bitcoin ETFs. Bitcoin investors consider ETFs important because they could allow more institutional investment via retirement plans.

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A judge in the US District Court for Southern New York, Analisa Torres, has ruled that the defendants in the SEC v. Ripple case committed violations of the Securities Act of 1933. Torres also ruled that Ripple’s co-founders, Brad Garlinghouse and Chris Larsen, should stand trial in front of a jury for their violations.

In a move that was interpreted by some as a partial win for Ripple, Judge Torres also partially denied the SEC’s request for summary judgment.

The ruling states that Ripple illegally sold $728 million worth of unregistered securities via institutional sales of XRP. However, Torres ruled that Ripple did not illegally offer $757 million worth of unregistered securities via programmatic sales of XRP.

Nor, according to Torres, did Ripple illegally offer $609 million worth of other distributions (bonuses, compensation for labor, etc.) of XRP.

SEC v. Ripple: A split decision

In short, the judge issued a split decision. She granted in part and denied in part both parties’ motions for summary judgment (summary requests a judge to rule on a matter without deferring to a jury of peers). 

However, the crypto community extrajudicially interpreted one ruling regarding programmatic sales of XRP — which account for less than 1% of XRP trading volume since 2017 — plus a confusingly-written page 15 — comparing the alphanumeric cryptographic sequence of code that is the literal XRP token to whiskey casks, payphones, condominiums, and beavers — as a ruling that meant that “XRP is not a security.”

The judge didn’t issue that ruling. Nevertheless, the price of XRP rallied over 60% within a few hours of the news.

The reality is more nuanced. In fact, Judge Torres explicitly declined to rule on the legality of 99% of XRP trading volume since 2017.

Read more: Judge rules LBRY’s token is a security — what about XRP?

The court does not address secondary market sales

After explaining that programmatic sales of XRP were not unregistered securities offerings and that programmatic sales accounted for less than 1% of global XRP trading volume since 2017, she wrote, “The Court does not address whether secondary market sales of XRP constitute offers and sales of investment contracts because that question is not properly before the Court.”

Secondary markets are regular crypto exchanges like Bitstamp or Coinbase.

In other words, Judge Torres didn’t rule on whether 99% of XRP transactions since 2017 were legal. Deciding that question was not necessary to resolve this lawsuit.

The judge simply ruled that institutional sales of XRP were illegal, but that programmatic sales and other distributions of XRP were not.

Institutional sales were pretty clearly unregistered securities transactions. Institutions signed literal paper contracts with Ripple and received investment materials from the company when buying XRP. Ripple never registered those sales despite it being required by law. Simple.

Regarding other distributions, Judge Torres ruled that no one “invested money” to receive those distributions — the first prong of the Howey Test. Because no one invested money, no unregistered investment contracts existed.

The most interesting category to the crypto community was the second category: Programmatic sales. So what, exactly, were programmatic sales of XRP?

As opposed to a typical crypto exchange transaction that matches a customer’s bid with another customer’s offer (often while secretly trading against its own customers), programmatic sales of XRP accounted for a tiny amount of trading volume since 2017 ($757 million versus trillions), sold in “blind bid/ask transactions,” via algorithms, where “purchasers did not know who was selling.”

These bids and offers weren’t manually placed by a human and didn’t involve any regular crypto exchange customer selling XRP.

These particular transactions weren’t unregistered offerings of securities, according to Judge Torres.

Read more: XRP surges as judge orders SEC to release Hinman files

Background on the lawsuit

Section 5 of the Securities Act of 1933 states that it’s “unlawful for any person, directly or indirectly… to offer to sell, offer to buy or purchase, or sell a security” unless it’s registered with the SEC or qualifies for a registration exemption.

The SEC originally filed a lawsuit in December 2020 alleging that Ripple, Garlinghouse, and Larsen raised $1.3 billion via unregistered securities sales. Rather than settle the matter, Ripple decided to fight it in court. The battle has lasted more than two and a half years.

Although they now have a ruling from a judge, either party may appeal to the Second Circuit. The lawsuit will probably continue for another year or two on appeal. If appealed to the Supreme Court, a final ruling could take many, many years.

The primary issue in this case involved whether Ripple’s native token, XRP, could meet the conditions of the Howey Test, which the SEC typically uses to determine whether an asset is a security. The SEC initially argued that Ripple and its cofounders failed to register its offering with the SEC and failed to make required disclosures regarding the nature of their XRP offerings.

The Howey Test specifically states that a transaction counts as a sale of a security if the following conditions are met:

1. An investment of money
2. In a common enterprise
3. With the expectation of profit
4. To be derived from the efforts of others

This test stems from an early case that involved a company that sold orange groves to investors and then leased them back to manage them and sell the oranges, offering to share the profits with them. The company’s name was W. J. Howey Co. 

The US Supreme Court ruled on Howey in 1946.

Summary

Torres ruled that Ripple’s XRP sales to institutional buyers were unregistered securities. Torres also ruled that Ripple had its constitutionally-guaranteed “fair notice.” The Howey Test applies to crypto; Ripple knew that the Howey Test applies to crypto; and Ripple knew it was violating Howey.

However, programmatic buyers — those who bought XRP through blind bid/ask transactions via an algorithm — didn’t necessarily know whether they were entering into an investment contract with Ripple. This blindness helped rule out the possibility that these XRP purchasers had a reasonable expectation of profit.

Most importantly, Torres declined to rule on whether 99% of sales of XRP on regular crypto exchanges were unregistered investment contracts.

Nonetheless, many exchanges have already decided to relist XRP.

Ripple and the SEC are still likely to go through years worth of appeals. Over a billion dollars worth of disgorgement and fines are at stake.

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In hopes of attracting organic activity, airdrops were once a popular way to bootstrap adoption for new crypto networks. XRP was particularly attractive due to its ultra-low transaction fees.

When the SEC sued Ripple for conducting an unregistered securities sale in December 2020, several XRP-friendly airdrops were quickly launched.

Fearing that the US government might shut down the XRP Ledger, win a debilitating financial settlement against Ripple, or otherwise inhibit growth in the industry, many projects viewed early 2021 as the last opportunity to run a successful airdrop campaign to XRP token holders.

However, most social media accounts of airdrops from this time either no longer exist or have become inactive. Some accounts claimed to support a good cause; others used a celebrity’s image — possibly without permission — or used suspicious marketing tactics.

Flare (FLR) airdrop

The largest airdrop in XRP history was Flare. It took a snapshot of the XRP network on December 2020 — the same month that the SEC filed its lawsuit. It planned to reward XRP holders with its 1:1 FLR airdrop.

After a two-year wait, Flare finally conducted its airdrop in January 2023. Specifically, Flare airdropped 4.28 billion FLR, allocating 1 token for every 1 XRP held, as of its December 2020 snapshot. 

Opening for trading north of $0.04, Flare initially seemed to be a $170 million market capitalization ‘gift’ to the XRP community. In reality, FLR immediately plummeted as airdrop recipients sold their gifts at any price. 

The price of FLR has never recovered. Today, it trades 90% below its first day of trading. 

Worse, Flare has steadily diluted the supply of FLR; original holders have been diluted from 4.28 billion to 18.9 billion circulating FLR tokens.

Initially, Flare had intended to build a DeFi app using XRP, but swiveled to a Layer 1 blockchain and oracle network. Google queries for XRP FLR peaked in January 2021 — shortly after Flare’s snapshot — and again in January 2023 during Flare’s airdrop. Nowadays, interest in this query is again languishing near lows.

Other airdrops to XRP holders

Most XRP airdrops are new projects looking for a little promotion. An XRPL validator called xpmarket launched in January 2022 and offered an XPcoin airdrop to anyone who signed into its website or scanned a code with the Xumm app.

That airdropped flopped and is now worth $0, according to its own website.

XRP Healthcare

XRP Healthcare’s planned roadmap promised to airdrop its token (XRPH) and independent XRPH wallets in Q4 2022. It joined Twitter in September 2022.

The earliest available price data indicates XRPH traded at a high of $0.228 and a low of $0.18 on February 10, 2023.

The token’s price history indicates an all-time high of nearly 30 cents on March 9, 2023.

As of July 3, 2023, it was hovering around $0.044 and had a fully diluted valuation of $4,454,002. XRP Healthcare capped XRPH’s supply at 100 million tokens.

Read more: Ripple network overloaded by airdrop spam, crypto wallets knocked offline

XNET

XNET promised to take a snapshot of the XRP network on January 12, 2024 and airdrop XNET tokens to XRP holders on March 20, 2024.

XNET’s all-time high price was $4; the same day it launched, on November 28, 2022.

Gecko Terminal places XNET’s current price at $0.035 with a fully diluted valuation of about $849 million. That’s a 99% decline.

CORE

Coreum planned a CORE airdrop for XRP holders. It scheduled its snapshot for March 24, 2023 with airdrops booked for April 1, June 1, August 1, and November 1, 2023. It also planned an XCORE token airdrop for May 15, 2023.

At Coreum Token’s launch on March 7, 2022, it reached a high of just over $0.69.

As of July 3, 2022, it has declined 82% to below $0.12, with a fully diluted valuation of $59 million.

Vagabond

Vagabond (VGB) took a snapshot of XRP holders. VGB token reached its all-time high over $75 when it launched in November 2021 with a market cap in the billions.

It has crashed 99%. At press time, VGB trades below $0.01 with a market cap under $1 million.

Additional examples of XRP airdrops follow a similar trend. Most open for trading near all-time highs and vanishingly few regain their highs achieved during their first week of trading.

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