Two days from now, the US Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee will give the XRP army its most closely watched stage since the lawsuit between Ripple and the US Securities and Exchange Commission began. At 10 a.m. ET on Wednesday, July 9, the panel will convene in Dirksen 538 for a hearing titled “From Wall Street to Web3: Building Tomorrow’s Digital Asset Markets.”
The session will be webcast live and—crucially for XRP holders—will feature Ripple Chief Executive Brad Garlinghouse alongside Blockchain Association chief executive (and former CFTC commissioner) Summer Mersinger, Chainalysis co-founder Jonathan Levin, and Paradigm general partner Dan Robinson. Committee staff have indicated that the discussion will focus on whether certain tokens should be treated as “digital commodities”—a category that would place primary oversight with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission rather than the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Why July 9 Critical For XRP?
Garlinghouse enters the hearing with the wind at his back. On June 27 he announced that Ripple would withdraw its cross-appeal in the company’s long-running enforcement fight with the SEC, adding on X, “We’re closing this chapter once and for all.” The SEC is widely expected to drop its own appeal of Judge Analisa Torres’s July 2023 ruling, which held that XRP traded on secondary exchanges does not constitute an unregistered security—although the judge left a $125 million civil penalty in place for earlier institutional sales. The procedural détente has removed an immediate litigation cloud but left the larger statutory question—what is XRP?—squarely in Congress’s hands.
That question sits at the heart of several bills now threading their way through Capitol Hill. The House last year passed the bipartisan FIT21 Act, while the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act of 2025 would expressly define tokens that achieve “functional decentralization” as commodities.
In the Senate, Banking Chairman Tim Scott has set a self-imposed deadline to mark up a comprehensive market-structure bill by September 30. As he put it in a June 27 fireside chat, “I’ve been very clear that I believe the President’s mandate of moving the GENIUS Act immediately to his desk is in the best interest of the American people, and making sure that there is a timeline for market structure to be completed by September 30th.” Wednesday’s testimony will feed directly into that legislative drafting effort.
Industry witnesses are expected to deliver sharply contrasting perspectives. In a preview on X, Mersinger wrote that “The United States urgently needs clear, comprehensive, and carefully designed rules for digital assets,” signaling that she will press lawmakers to codify CFTC jurisdiction over spot markets. Paradigm’s Robinson is expected to warn against rules that “lock in” incumbent custodians—concerns he has raised in prior testimony.
Markets will have one eye on the policy debate and the other on XRP’s price tape. The token broke above $2.28 overnight after news of Ripple’s pursuit of a US bank charter, extending a two-week rally that options desks say is crowded with $3 strike calls. A formal Senate signal that XRP is more commodity than security could strengthen the (already very strong) odds for a spot ETF.
For now, the only certainty is that Wednesday’s hearing will generate the most authoritative public record yet on how Congress plans to draw the line between securities and commodities in Web3—and whether XRP ultimately stands on the same side of that line as wheat, gold, and Bitcoin.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.28.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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