Atkins Says Most Crypto Isn't a Security, and XRP Barely Blinks

SEC Chair Paul Atkins used a speech at the Economic Club of Dallas to say what crypto has waited years to hear: most crypto assets are not themselves securities. He pointed to the agency's proposed Regulation Crypto Assets and a new Innovation Exemption for trading tokenized securities onchain. Four days before that, Ripple announced the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency had granted final approval to charter Ripple National Trust Bank.

The market shrugged. XRP traded at $1.25, up just 1.12% over 24 hours, sitting inside a 16.08% drop for October 2026. The token is 65.75% below its $3.65 record set in July 2025, so warm words from a regulator haven't bent the trend.

The rulebook Atkins name-checked landed as a proposal on August 18, 2026. It would free startups raising up to $5 million over four years, or as much as $75 million in a single year, from full SEC registration. A safe harbor would spell out legal protection for when a token stops being an investment contract, the test where a buyer puts in money expecting profits from someone else's work. Comments run 60 days after it hits the Federal Register, and it is still only a proposal.

XRP already ran this gauntlet. The SEC sued Ripple in December 2020, and on July 13, 2023, Judge Analisa Torres ruled the token itself isn't an investment contract, though Ripple's institutional sales broke the law as unregistered offerings. Torres refused a joint SEC-Ripple bid on June 26, 2025, to lift the injunction and trim the $125 million penalty, and the agency closed things out on August 7, 2025, when both sides dropped their appeals. Read against the new proposal, XRP mostly falls outside it anyway, since the exemptions target projects raising fresh money.

Ripple is a different animal now. It says it holds more than 85 licenses, serves over 1,700 institutions, and is tracking toward roughly $900 million in revenue by the end of 2026, without saying how much rides on XRP. The new trust bank is wired into the stablecoin side, managing segregated reserves for Ripple USD, acting as collateral trustee and offering digital-asset custody, with no opening date announced yet. RLUSD tops $2.43 billion in market value and carries a Moody's A2 rating, and Steven McClurg, CEO of XRP fund manager Canary Capital, said Ripple's real strength is remittances and RLUSD.

Plenty of heavyweights are circling the stablecoin, not the token. Robinhood Markets plans to settle in RLUSD on the XRP Ledger, and BNY is adding both XRP and RLUSD to custody. Circle, which locked in final OCC approval in July 2026 with USDC at $73.3 billion in circulation, pulled in $668 million of reserve income in the second quarter of 2026 even as its reserve return rate slipped 66 basis points to 3.5%, while Coinbase, Crypto.com and Stripe-owned Bridge remain at the conditional stage. Neither Atkins's remarks nor Ripple's charter mentions XRP as a settlement asset, and its main job there is paying network fees that get burned, earning Ripple nothing. XRP spot ETFs saw net outflows on October 30, 2026, the day Atkins spoke, and the coin is down 50.17% over the past year. The next tell: whether it can hold above its 200-day moving average of $1.28 once a final rule exists.