On July 6, Luxembourg’s financial regulator, the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier, upgraded Ripple’s preliminary Crypto-Asset Service Provider authorization into a full license under the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets framework. The approval means Ripple can passport regulated crypto services across all 30 countries of the European Economic Area, from Lisbon to Helsinki, under a single national authorization. Cassie Craddock, Ripple’s managing director for the UK and Europe, framed the moment plainly: the company enters the post-transitional MiCA era fully compliant and ready to scale.
Summary
- Ripple secured a full MiCA license in Luxembourg, allowing it to offer regulated crypto services across the European Economic Area.
- While Europe has given Ripple regulatory certainty, XRP’s legal classification in the U.S. still depends on the CLARITY Act.
- The article explores whether Ripple’s expanding regulatory footprint can eventually translate into stronger XRP demand.
Five days later, on the other side of the Atlantic, the legislation that would finally tell American regulators what XRP actually is remained stuck in the Senate. A merged draft of the CLARITY Act is expected the week of July 13, floor action is penciled in for the week of July 20, and the whole effort still needs roughly 7 Democratic votes it does not currently have. Galaxy Research has cut its odds of passage in 2026 to a coin flip.
That is the strange position Ripple occupies in the summer of 2026. A company born in San Francisco, hardened by a 4-year fight with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and lobbying harder than almost anyone for American crypto legislation, is now more comprehensively regulated in Europe than it has ever been at home. The Luxembourg license is not just a compliance milestone. It is a measuring stick for how far apart the two largest Western markets have drifted, and a live experiment in whether regulatory certainty actually converts into business, and eventually into token demand.
What Ripple actually won in Luxembourg
The July 6 approval was the second half of a two-part regulatory build that Ripple has been assembling in the Grand Duchy for most of a year. The first half arrived on February 2, when the CSSF granted Ripple full approval as an Electronic Money Institution. The EMI license lets the company issue electronic money and run regulated fiat payment services across the European Union. It followed a preliminary EMI approval a month earlier and came shortly after Ripple picked up an EMI license and a cryptoasset registration from the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, extending the same regulated posture to Britain.
The CASP license completes the picture on the crypto side. Under MiCA, a Crypto-Asset Service Provider authorization covers custody, exchange, transfer, and related services for cryptoassets. Ripple received preliminary CASP approval from the CSSF on June 23, then satisfied the remaining conditions in under 2 weeks, converting the in-principle nod into a full license just after MiCA’s transition period closed on July 1. As crypto.news reported, the timing put Ripple inside the licensed perimeter at the exact moment the perimeter became a hard wall.
The combination matters more than either license alone. With the EMI approval, European banks, fintechs, and corporates can move regulated fiat and e-money through Ripple. With the CASP approval, the same clients can move cryptoassets and stablecoin flows through the same provider under the same rulebook. Ripple Payments, the company’s cross-border settlement product, has processed more than $100 billion across more than 60 markets globally. The Luxembourg stack gives that product a clean legal wrapper in a bloc of roughly 450 million people, with one regulator to answer to and 30 countries to sell into.
Ripple says its global license count now exceeds 75 authorizations, registrations, and approvals, a portfolio that spans Singapore, Dubai, New York’s BitLicense regime, and now the heart of the EU. Few crypto-native companies carry anything comparable. That was a deliberate strategy long before MiCA existed: sell to banks, and you must look like something a bank compliance department can approve.
The graveyard on the other side of the deadline
The value of a MiCA license is easiest to see in what happened to the companies that do not have one. The regulation’s transition period ended on July 1, 2026. From that date, any firm offering covered crypto services in the EEA without CASP authorization must limit or stop those services. The European Securities and Markets Authority added 57 newly approved firms to its register right after the deadline, bringing the total to around 300 authorized providers. Set that against the more than 1,200 firms that operated in Europe under the old patchwork of national regimes, and the scale of the cull becomes clear. By some counts, only around 210 of those incumbent companies completed the licensing process in time.
The casualty list includes names that would have seemed untouchable 2 years ago. Binance, the largest exchange in the world by volume, failed to secure authorization in time through its Greek application and has told customers in several European markets that services are suspended while it seeks approval elsewhere. Tether chose not to apply at all, citing objections to MiCA’s stablecoin requirements, and USDT has been delisted from European venues as a result. Hundreds of smaller firms now face a choice between merging with licensed competitors, shrinking to non-covered activities, or exiting the region entirely.
The passporting mechanism is what makes a single national license so valuable. Under MiCA, a firm authorized in one member state can offer covered crypto services throughout the EU and the wider EEA without seeking separate national approvals, the same single-market logic that has governed European banking and investment services for decades.
Before MiCA, a crypto company wanting continental coverage needed a patchwork of national registrations, each with its own rules, timelines, and supervisory quirks, and each revocable on its own schedule. After MiCA, the choice of home regulator became a strategic decision, because one supervisor now stands behind a firm’s entire European footprint. That concentration cuts both ways.
A company with a Luxembourg license answers to a regulator with a long institutional finance pedigree and a reputation for rigor, which reassures bank counterparties. It also means a single supervisory dispute could, in theory, imperil access to 30 markets at once. Firms accepted that trade because the alternative, 30 separate relationships, was worse.
Luxembourg, meanwhile, has become one of the main gateways for the firms that made it through. Coinbase won its MiCA license from the CSSF in June 2025, opened a physical hub in the country, and migrated its EU operations into a dedicated Luxembourg entity.
Standard Chartered received its authorization through the same regulator. B2C2 took the Luxembourg route for its European trading business. Ripple now joins that group, which turns the Grand Duchy into something like the institutional crypto capital of the EU, a jurisdiction that courted the industry with dedicated blockchain legislation and a regulator willing to process serious applications quickly.
For Ripple specifically, the competitive math is straightforward. Every payments client it pitches in Europe now faces a shrunken menu of fully licensed providers. The company spent years and considerable money building a compliance posture that most rivals treated as optional. MiCA just made it mandatory, and Ripple crossed the line while much of the field did not.
The license lands on top of an institutional build-out
The Luxembourg approval did not arrive in isolation. It caps 12 months in which Ripple assembled more institutional infrastructure than in the previous decade combined, which is what makes the token’s indifference so striking and the license so strategically loaded.
Start with the prime brokerage. Ripple closed its $1.25 billion acquisition of Hidden Road in October 2025, folding a multi-asset prime broker into the company and rebranding the operation as Ripple Prime. On March 2, 2026, Ripple Prime appeared in the participant directory of the National Securities Clearing Corporation, the DTCC subsidiary that clears the vast majority of American equity trades.
The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation processes transactions measured in the quadrillions of dollars annually and safeguards roughly $100 trillion in assets. Having XRP-linked infrastructure inside that machine is the kind of positioning that takes years to arrange and cannot be improvised later. DTCC has since named Ripple Prime to the industry working group of more than 50 firms shaping its tokenization service for Russell 1000 stocks, major ETFs, and US Treasuries, scheduled to launch in October 2026.
Then the ledger itself. Tokenized real-world assets on the XRP Ledger grew from $991 million at the start of 2026 to roughly $3.5 billion by midsummer. In early May, JPMorgan, Mastercard, Ondo Finance, and Ripple completed the first cross-border tokenized US Treasury redemption on XRPL, clearing in under 5 seconds.
Daily transactions on the ledger hit 3 million on March 15, roughly triple the averages of mid-2025. RLUSD, the stablecoin at the center of Ripple’s settlement strategy, reached a market capitalization of $1.72 billion in under a year, with more than $18 billion in transfer volume in the first quarter of 2026 alone. And in July, Ripple joined Open USD, the consortium dollar stablecoin backed by Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, BlackRock, and more than 140 other companies, hedging its own stablecoin bet with a seat at the industry table.
Every item on that list is the kind of development that, in a friendlier market, would have carried its own rally. Instead, each landed on a chart grinding lower, which is a useful reminder of how much of crypto pricing in 2026 is macro beta and how little is project-specific fundamentals. The relevance to the Luxembourg story is this: the license is not a standalone trophy. It is the regulatory layer of a stack that now includes clearing access, tokenization rails, a stablecoin, and a prime broker. Europe is where that full stack can operate legally today.
Meanwhile in Washington: a bill, a deadline, and seven missing votes
The contrast with the United States is not subtle. The CLARITY Act, the market structure bill that would sort digital assets into commodity and security buckets and hand spot market oversight of digital commodities to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has traveled further than any crypto legislation in American history. The House passed it 294 to 134 in July 2025. The Senate Banking Committee advanced its version 15 to 9 on May 14, 2026, with Democrats Ruben Gallego and Angela Alsobrooks crossing over. The bill sits on the Senate Legislative Calendar, eligible for a floor vote whenever leadership schedules one.
And there it sits. A unified draft merging the Banking and Agriculture Committee texts, reportedly more than 70 pages longer than the earlier versions and heavier on consumer protections, is expected as soon as the week of July 13, with floor action targeted for the week of July 20. The Senate breaks for recess on August 7.
Senator Cynthia Lummis has warned that failure in this window likely means no market structure law before 2030. Galaxy Research has lowered its passage odds for 2026 to 50%, down from 75% right after the committee vote, and Stifel’s Washington strategist has written that the bill’s prospects deteriorate materially if it misses the recess deadline.
The blockage is not primarily about crypto. It is about ethics. Senate Democrats have demanded language barring senior government officials, including the president, from holding business interests in the crypto industry, a demand aimed squarely at the Trump family’s estimated $2.3 billion in crypto exposure across memecoins, World Liberty Financial, and mining ventures.
The White House has said it will accept rules that apply across the board but not language that singles out one officeholder. A tentative compromise involving state attorney general enforcement fell apart. Even Gallego and Alsobrooks have said their floor votes depend on the ethics fix. As crypto.news covered, disputes over vacant SEC and CFTC commissioner seats have layered a second standoff on top of the first.
Two more fault lines complicate the count. Senator Amy Klobuchar has proposed an amendment that would block new CFTC rules from taking effect until at least four commissioners are confirmed, effectively turning the agency staffing dispute into a statutory switch on the entire regulatory framework the bill would create. CFTC Chair Selig has pushed back, arguing on July 9 that the bill is being derailed by matters extraneous to its substance and that the agency does not need a quorum to write rules.
And law enforcement groups have raised objections to Section 604, the developer protection language drawn from the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, worried it could complicate illicit finance cases. Senator Ron Wyden countered on July 8 with a letter to Senate leadership urging that the BRCA provisions be preserved, giving the DeFi industry its one clear win of the month. Lummis, for her part, has answered the illicit finance critique by pointing to more than 16 safeguards in the text and $150 million in dedicated enforcement funding.
Add it together, and the arithmetic is unforgiving. Three working weeks remain in July, a defense spending bill competes for floor time, and every unresolved dispute needs to close simultaneously for 7 Democrats to move. The committee vote on May 14 offered a preview of what passage would be worth: within an hour of the 15-9 result, Bitcoin jumped to $81,449, and XRP gained 4.5% on the day. Citi has a $143,000 Bitcoin target and Standard Chartered a $150,000 target contingent on the bill becoming law. Markets have, in other words, priced regulatory clarity as a real asset. The Senate simply has not delivered it.
So the American question that matters most to Ripple, whether XRP is a digital commodity under CFTC oversight or something the SEC can still reach, remains formally unanswered. The 2023 court ruling in the SEC’s case against Ripple found that programmatic sales of XRP on exchanges were not securities transactions, and the SEC case itself ended in a settlement in 2025. But a court ruling in one district and a dropped enforcement action are not a statute. They are precedents that a future administration, a future commission, or a future judge could narrow. That is precisely the uncertainty the CLARITY Act exists to remove, and precisely the uncertainty Europe has already removed for Ripple’s payments business.
Does a license move a token?
Here is where the bull case and the bear case split, and both deserve a fair hearing.
The bear case is blunt: the Luxembourg license is a company milestone, not a token catalyst. Ripple’s own announcement barely mentions XRP. The approval covers Ripple’s regulated payments services, not its tokens, and MiCA runs a separate authorization track for stablecoins that RLUSD has not yet cleared. Until that happens, Ripple’s own dollar token cannot be offered to the European public, a gap rivals like Circle’s USDC do not have.
Most Ripple Payments volume today settles in RLUSD or fiat, not XRP, and where XRP does route payments across the XRP Ledger, the fees burned per transaction amount to fractions of a cent. When the preliminary CASP approval landed in June, XRP fell about 3% that week alongside the broader market. The market looked at the news and, quite rationally, did not treat it as a buy signal.
The token’s price action through 2026 supports that reading. XRP peaked near $3.65 in July 2025, closed last year around $1.90, and has spent this summer defending the $1 level, trading recently in the $1.05 to $1.13 range. None of Ripple’s regulatory wins arrested the slide, because the slide was never about Ripple. It tracked a market-wide drawdown that pulled Bitcoin below $60,000 and cut altcoins far deeper.
The bull case asks for a longer clock. Regulatory moats compound slowly. Ripple can now sell regulated crypto payments to European banks and corporates at a moment when much of its competition legally cannot, and enterprise procurement cycles that begin in 2026 produce volume in 2027 and 2028. If that volume increasingly touches the XRP Ledger, whether through On-Demand Liquidity corridors, RLUSD flows that settle on XRPL, or tokenized asset activity, the token accrues usage that exists independently of speculative sentiment.
Institutional demand channels are also open in a way they were not a year ago: spot XRP ETFs have logged roughly $1.49 billion in cumulative net inflows since launching in November 2025, and as crypto.news noted, that streak recently stretched to 8 consecutive weeks even as the price languished. Standard Chartered and JPMorgan have both projected $4 to $8.4 billion in first-year ETF inflows if the CLARITY Act passes and unlocks allocators who cannot touch unclassified assets.
The honest synthesis is that the license changes Ripple’s revenue trajectory with high confidence and XRP’s demand trajectory with low confidence. The link between the two runs through actual ledger usage, and that is a metric to watch, not a headline to trade.
The deeper pattern: Two systems, two bets
Step back from Ripple and the transatlantic gap looks like two different theories of how to regulate an industry.
Europe chose comprehensiveness first. MiCA is a single rulebook, written once, applied across 30 countries, with a hard deadline and real exclusion for non-compliance. Its critics have a point: the regime’s stablecoin rules, including a blanket ban on interest and heavy bank-deposit reserve requirements, pushed the largest stablecoin issuer on earth out of the market, and the European Commission has already opened a consultation on whether parts of the framework need repair. A rulebook that excludes Tether and stalls RLUSD is not obviously optimized for growth. But it exists, it is enforceable, and a company that clears it knows exactly where it stands.
The United States chose litigation first and legislation later, maybe. The SEC’s enforcement campaign defined the rules by lawsuit, Ripple’s case being the canonical example, and the current Congress is attempting to replace that regime with statute under intense time pressure and presidential conflict-of-interest baggage that no other financial bill has ever carried. The fallback if CLARITY fails is the SEC’s administrative framework known as Regulation Crypto, which Chair Paul Atkins has described as a bridge to legislation. A bridge built by one commission can be dismantled by the next, which is exactly the problem statutes exist to solve. Similar dynamics played out in the stablecoin fight that preceded this one, where, as crypto.news reported, even a bill that eventually passed spent months hostage to fights over state versus federal authority.
For a company like Ripple, which sells to the most conservative buyers in finance, the European bet pays off immediately, and the American bet pays off only if Congress acts. Cross-border payments are also a business where network effects follow regulatory access. Japan already shows what deep institutional integration looks like, with SBI running XRP-based remittance corridors that have no real American equivalent, a story crypto.news has examined in depth. Europe is now the second major bloc where Ripple can attempt that playbook with full regulatory cover. The United States, the company’s home market, is the one place where it still cannot.
There is one more wrinkle worth naming. If the CLARITY Act does pass before the August recess, the transatlantic gap closes fast, and it closes in a way that favors assets with existing institutional plumbing. XRP would enter CFTC jurisdiction as a digital commodity with ETFs already trading, a prime brokerage arm already inside the DTCC’s clearing ecosystem, and a European license portfolio already generating regulated volume. The pieces would connect. If the bill dies, the gap becomes the story for another year at minimum, and Ripple’s center of commercial gravity keeps shifting toward jurisdictions that gave it an answer.
What to watch from here
Three markers will tell the story faster than any press release.
First, RLUSD’s European stablecoin authorization. The EMI license gives Ripple the corporate foundation to seek approval for its stablecoin under MiCA’s separate e-money token rules. Until that clears, the most natural settlement asset in Ripple’s European stack stays off the shelf for public offering, and the license story remains half finished.
Second, disclosed European client wins. Licenses are permission, not demand. The proof that regulatory certainty converts into business will arrive as named banks, payment providers, and corporates routing volume through Ripple Payments in the EEA. Watch for whether those announcements specify XRPL settlement or quietly settle in fiat and RLUSD, because that distinction is the entire XRP investment case in miniature.
Third, the Senate floor in the last 2 weeks of July. The merged CLARITY draft, the ethics compromise or its absence, and the 7-Democrat math will determine whether the United States joins Europe in giving Ripple a rulebook or hands the company another year of asymmetry. Either outcome is informative. One of them is also tradable.
The Luxembourg license will not move XRP this week, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something. What it does is quietly settle an older argument. For years, skeptics said Ripple’s compliance-heavy strategy was expensive theater in an industry that rewarded speed over permission.
In Europe, in July 2026, permission became the product. The companies that skipped the theater are locked out of a market of 450 million people, and the company that endured 4 years of litigation from its own government is, for the moment, more welcome in Brussels than in Washington. That inversion says less about Ripple than it does about the two systems that produced it, and the next month will reveal whether the American half of the story finally catches up.
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