TL;DR

• SEC v Ripple has come to an end, with Ripple agreeing to pay a $125mio fine; XRP is officially not a security, and Ripple is not barred from selling XRP except through certain channels;
• Re-running my analyses from 2022 gives a valuation for Ripple common stock in the mid-500s per share, based on a $3.30 XRP price—compared to a $120 price in secondary markets¹, and a recent tender at $175;
• Ripple is also aggressively buying back stock, which is compressing the discount, but the company needs to accelerate the buybacks or go public—preferably the latter—to justify the current price and compress the discount.

Disclaimer: I own a bunch of Ripple common stock thanks to being an employee there for nearly five years, so I’m absolutely talking my book with this article.

Back in 2022, I posted about how to value Ripple’s equity². The synthesis was that Ripple’s common equity ($28/share at the time) was priced for an excessively high probability of getting zeroed by SEC v Ripple, and you could make a case for it being worth somewhere in the low triple digits.

Well. Three years later, SEC v Ripple has finally (finally!) concluded this afternoon, with Ripple paying a $125mio fine but not being barred from selling XRP. The company has built up its balance sheet, too: selling down XRP to buy back stock, build cash, and conduct the odd acquisition. Seems like an opportune moment to re-run my valuations and reassess where fair value might be.

Three updated valuations

Sum-of-the-parts valuation

Here’s the latest numbers I have for Ripple, after the close of the June 2025 tender offer:

• 162mio shares out³
• $3.2bn cash on the balance sheet = $19/share
• 41bn XRP @ 21% corporate tax rate = 200 XRP/share. (Ripple holds the majority of their XRP on their books at zero, so they’ll pay tax when they sell it—hence the 21% discount here.)
• The VC portfolio is on the books at $680mio = $4/share
• I don’t have good numbers on the Ripple Payments business, so I’ll reuse the $1.1bn valuation from my 2022 piece = $7/share. (If anyone has updated numbers for the operating business, I’m josh@josh.sg)
• And let’s re-use the 25% CEF discount from the 2022 piece.

That gets you to 200 XRP, $19 of cash, and $11 of everything else per share; with XRP around $3.30 after the settlement of SEC v Ripple, that’s $517/share after the 25% CEF discount.

Scenario valuation

Let’s dig up the old scenario matrix from my 2022 piece. Now that SEC v Ripple is in the rear-view, some of these outcomes are no longer in play: a bar on the sale of XRP is not in play, and a company-ending fine is not in play either. This chops off the left tail of the distribution, and you’re left with the two favorable outcomes.

The actual fine was exactly halfway between those two outcomes, and while Ripple has shown strong capital discipline, the discount has been slow to close; given both those things, a ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ split between the two outcomes from the original piece is as good a guess as any.

If you take those ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ probability weights and scale them up to reflect a $3.30 XRP price instead of $1.75, and 200 XRP a share instead of 260, that gets you to $561/share.

Valuing cashflows from buybacks

Now that Ripple’s buying back its stock, we have actual cashflows to price. And the tenders aren’t small, either; here’s what Ripple’s done so far:

• December 2023: 2.5% of the company (4.6mio shares) at $61.48;
• June 2024: 2.6% of the company (4.6mio shares) at $61.48;
• December 2024: 2.3% of the company (4mio shares) at $125; and,
• June 2025: 2.4% of the company (4mio shares) at $175.

Now, this is absolutely the right thing for Ripple to do and the C-suite are legends for doing it. If they can buy back stock cheaper than net assets, it’s accretive to shareholders to sell XRP and buy back stock, and they should do it until the discount compresses⁴.

The tricky thing is that at the current rate, the buybacks get you to a decent, but not amazing, valuation. If you assume that Ripple buys back 5% of the company each year at $175/share, and you discount those cashflows at 6%, that only implies $73/share of value.

So, looking purely at the cashflows from the tender offers, Ripple needs to accelerate the buybacks, increase the price, or go public. To justify the $120 price where the stock is currently trading, Ripple could buy back 12% of the company per year at $175, or 7% per year at $230.

That all said: the fastest way for Ripple to collapse the valuation discount would be to grasp the nettle and go public. A stream of cash from buybacks is good, but cash on the barrelhead from the public markets is even better—and now that the company’s out from under the SEC lawsuit, there’s nothing in the way of them going public. (And as much as I don’t want to use Strategy as a comp, but the market for publicly-listed crypto treasury companies is so hot right now.)