it was written off as a dino coin dinosaur but after years of litigation and sideways price action xrp has exploded back into the Limelight and the Catalyst was simple Trump is back in Gary Gensler is out and the regulatory shackles are finally coming off of Ripple it was a recipe for a parabolic repricing and the results were delicious but what if this is just the beginning a crypto has entered Uncharted Territory and with Washington's war on crypto finally over it's time to ask what might the future hold for ripple and xrp stay tuned to find out xrp is a very old crypto but it is also the third largest B market cap sitting at around $50 billion north of tether's usdt at least at the time of shooting this video and there is a reason for this and it can't be put down to the fin criticism of the xrp army alone so why is xrp a big deal well when The xrp Ledger launched in 2012 xrp became the first crypto to be neither a Bitcoin Fork nor based on a proof of work consensus mechanism by removing the mining component The xrp Ledger was able to process transactions much faster than Bitcoin and its derivatives this was groundbreaking because it made fast payments a viable use case for blockchain for for the first time now to put things into perspective this was 3 years before ethereum and 8 years before salana was launched it was the cipher Punk era a simpler time when cryptocurrency was about decentralization and censorship resistance through Bitcoin and to a lesser extent its derivatives namecoin and Litecoin crypto was Niche underground and libertarian and the notion that financial institutions and governments would one day adopt it for whatever reason would have sounded crazy easy but then Along Came Ripple a tech startup with different ideas about who might be able to benefit from cryptocurrency Ripple sought to improve upon the existing infrastructure for making crossborder payments particularly between financial institutions The xrp Ledger was designed for this purpose and the entire supply of its native coin xrp was pre-mined with a very large portion given to Ripple and held in escrow now Ripple's business model initially involved selling xrp to investors in the US the SEC was extremely unimpressed by this and sued Ripple in 20120 for allegedly offering unregistered Securities this turned into a yearslong high stakes courtroom drama in which the SEC sought to bleed Ripple dry with a $2 billion penalty and established once and for all that cryptocurrencies were Securities that belonged under its regulatory mandate Ripple has since spent $50 million fighting the case and at the time of making this video it appears as if they have won quite decisively the SEC has filed an appeal against the 2023 ruling that tipped the scales in Ripple's favor but this isn't expected to accomplish much especially with the new SEC top brass with the end of the never ending lawsuit now in sight and a newly Pro crypto regime in Washington xrp looks like it just walked out of jail in the best shape of its life the question is what is next well xrp has already undergone a parabolic repricing to a new all-time high finally breaking a record set 7 years ago its market cap is bigger than tethers is it underpriced at this point probably not but then again who knows the future has literally never looked so bright for the US crypto industry of which Ripple is one of the most powerful and most prestigious members to be sure bullish market conditions are bound to Peter out at some point in the next four years and probably sooner than later but regardless of what happens to crypto prices companies like Ripple will be free to continue pursuing their business goals unimpeded by combative Regulators for the first time in recent history if anything the government appears poised to actively promote the crypto industry feels good man so the future is looking bright for both Ripple and xrp although each on slightly different time Horizons just how bright will depend on how favorable the policy and Regulatory environment becomes in the next four years it also may depend on President Trump's personal feelings towards Ripple as we now have a uh mem coin Dev in the Oval Office and two houses of Congress full of politicians who owe crypto a favor we think they're our grounds to be optimistic let's recap how we got here and the scale of the political debt now owed by us politicians to crypto industry donors last year the US crypto industry pumped an enormous amount of money into electoral campaigns to replace anti-crypto politicians with Pro crypto ones the main vehicle for this spending spree was fairshake the crypto industry's new nonpartisan Super PAC behind Fair Shake is crypto's very own Migos a team consisting of Ripple coinbase and a16z each gave around $50 million to Fair Shake during the 2024 election cycle making them by far the largest contributors to its $227 million War chest and if you're thinking wow $227 million sounds like a lot for one industry to contribute to electoral spending you're absolutely right crypto accounted for nearly half of all corporate spending in the 2024 election according into a report by public citizen no other interest group or industry was even close in second place was coke Industries which raised $26 million during the 2024 election cycle so fair Shake raised almost 10 times as much as the next largest corporate donor this is all the more remarkable because until 2024 the crypto industry's influence over American elections was virtually zero with the notable exception of Sam bankman free giving tens of millions of dollars to democratic candidates during the 2022 election cycle 2022 turned into a real train wreck for crypto thanks to a string of disasters culminating in the collapse of FTX the industry spent 2023 licking its wounds and getting kicked by the SEC when it was down but at some point in 2023 Fair Shake was founded and set about coordinating crypto's quiet transition from survival mode to attack mode the is known about Fair shak's origin story as Ripple coinbase and a6z won't discuss how the pack was formed who hired whom nor their ongoing relationship with fairshake management and yet just one year after fairshake was founded it made the crypto industry by far the biggest source of corporate campaign donations in the US to put this into perspective crypto corporations cumulative spending on us elections already amounts to 15% of all known corporate contributions since the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling in citizens united that ruling prohibited the US government from restricting corporate spending on us elections and this brought about a new golden age of Corporations going on shopping sprees for politicians corporate spending increased steadily after 2010 but no industry has ever taken the Citizens United ball and run with it quite as much as crypto did in 2024 the crypto industry is now second only to the fossil fuel corporations in total election spending since 2010 bear in mind it took the fossil fuel industry 14 years to spend a cumulative $176 million to date meanwhile the crypto industry spent $129 million over the last three election Cycles 92% of which was spent only in 2024 this level of spending is unprecedented and we probably have it to thank for the suddenly extremely Pro crypto posture from the US government the new composition of the house and the Senate are the clearest evidence of this of the candidates Fair Shake backed in Congressional races 85% were victorious in each case we can see how fairshake gave millions of dollars to help Dethrone skeptical lawmakers and install friendly ones however the backstory of Donald Trump's own pivot from crypto skeptic to mcoin Dev is less clear Trump launched his first nft collection in December 2022 so he had been dablin in crypto for quite some time prior to the 2024 election cycle but it wasn't until March 2024 that he started speaking positively about crypto in public a trump started small initially telling cnbc's squark boox quote I make money with it I have fun with it too crazy new currencies that's what I call them something must have happened between March and July because by July 27th he was the keynote speaker at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville telling the crowd that he wanted the future of crypto to be mined minted and made in America who Trump met and what persuaded him to become a full-blown activist during that period is a question we can't answer yet however we do know that Trump values loyalty tends to take things personally and holds grudges Business Leaders are well aware of this and now scrambling to get in his good books Amazon's Jeff beos Apple's Tim Cook Uber's Dar kaj rashah and open AI CEO Sam Alman all donated millions of dollars to Trump's inaugural fund but no one has kissed the ring quite so lovingly as Mark Zuckerberg Zuckerberg's perfectly timed Rebrand from Silicon Valley square and Trump critic to Joe Rogan guest seems like a prime private performance for Trump that just happens to be taking place in public as one former meta executive told Yahoo finance quote King Donald is up there and Mark is afraid of him he's a chameleon bowing to the King after donating handsomely to Trump's inaugural fund Zuckerberg enjoyed a front row seat to the inauguration on January 20th that evening he hosted a black tie reception for political donors to celebrate Trump and vice president JD Vance Zuckerberg has also visited Trump's maralago residence in Florida where he reportedly gifted Trump a pair of meta Rayban glasses I could keep going but you get the idea Zak is a little on the extreme end but he's not the only Tech leader that is falling over themselves to get into Trump's good books their strategy well donating hundreds of millions of dollars even well after Trump's election Victory sources in Trump's team told axios that they expect to raise about $500 million in donations by the summer although he can't run again in 2028 Trump is Keen not to be seen as a lame duck in his second term by amassing an enormous pile of cash he is flexing his Readiness to help political allies punish opponents and ensure that Republicans keep control of Congress at the 2026 midterms a source inside Trump's team told axios quote the money is just pouring in at Mara lgo Trump doesn't even have to lift a finger everyone's coming to him we're looking at half a billion dollars by June and we're on track and the most generous givers well it should be no surprise by now the source continued quote the crypto guys are just blowing it out it used to be $1 million was a big number now we're looking at some folks giving $10 million or $20 million so crypto is on a hot streak in Washington and the indust is Keen to keep up the momentum and unlike former Trump critics like Mark Zuckerberg crypto leaders are not in need of Mercy from the new president having never gotten on Trump's bad side they can aim much higher than just reconciliation and if Trump's impromptu mcoin launch was anything to go by crypto can look forward to a very favorable treatment over the next 4 years recently however there was some controversy over a certain crypto industry bigwig breaking with the Marga crypto Alliance Ripple co-founder Chris Larson donated $1. 7 million including $10 million worth of xrp to cala Harris's campaign this made him Harris's third largest individual donor although depending on when the campaign liquidated the xrp Holdings they could have sold for more like 50 to 60 million and this would make lson the biggest Harris donor of course course this is just conjecture and the Harris team could have paper handed xrp at 50 cents for all we know at any rate it was a conspicuous defection from an otherwise prot Trump crypto industry bench for reference even at $ 11. 7 million larsson's contribution as an individual donor was Far larger than the donations made by his industry peers to Trump Mark andreon gave Trump $5.
5 million Ben Horowitz gave him $2. 5 million and the winkl boss twins gave $2. 5 million on the other hand Ben Horowitz had a bit of a change of heart and later gave $2.
