What the GENIUS Act Means for XRP Investors

America’s crypto landscape took a significant turn last Friday when President Donald Trump signed the GENIUS Act into law. While this legislation provides a regulated path for stablecoin issuers like Ripple, some say it has a minimal impact on XRP, at least in any meaningful way.

“Ripple is uniquely positioned to benefit from this new legislation,” Austin King, co-founder of Omni Network, told Decrypt. The law gives stablecoins like “USDC and RLUSD a competitive advantage when it comes to institutional adoption, which is where the real winners will be made,” he added.

While competitors such as Circle’s USDC and Tether’s USDT will undoubtedly push to retain their market share, Ripple’s established cross-border positioning could help its RLUSD gain traction.

“The existence of RLUSD would allow Ripple to become a native, on-shore liquidity provider in the U.S., competing directly with USDC and PayPal USD,” Yuri Brisov, Partner at Digital & Analogue Partners, told Decrypt. This, he explained, will allow Ripple to “reconfigure itself as a core infrastructure provider within the U.S. financial system.”

However, any market share gains in the stablecoin arena are unlikely to translate into substantial price movements for XRP itself, Decrypt was told.

Although every RLUSD transaction burns a small amount of XRP to cover network fees, this volume pales in comparison to XRP’s 59.1 billion coins in circulation.

For example, the XRP Ledger has cumulatively burned a negligible 14 million tokens since its inception. Ripple CTO David Schwartz tempered expectations in the past, stating, “I still don’t think burned XRP will significantly reduce the supply any time soon.”

The SEC vs. Ripple lawsuit continues to cast a shadow over XRP’s classification, with its security status remaining split. 

While XRP is not deemed a security when sold programmatically on exchanges, it “may constitute a security in institutional placements,” according to Brisov.

He said the distinction “depends on sales context and leaves future classifications vulnerable to interpretation.”

Consequently, XRP will likely continue to serve as a bridge token, with minimal direct impact on its price from the GENIUS Act, Brisov said.

Brisov elaborated that the legislation allows Ripple to strategically “reduce reliance on XRP” where regulatory uncertainty persists, particularly in the context of sales, by leveraging RLUSD. “This allows Ripple to rebalance its exposure without abandoning its core technology stack.”

If the upcoming CLARITY Act, which proposes a formal path for digital assets to transition from securities to commodities, is adopted, it would bring clarity to XRP, according to Brisov. 

That would “eliminate ambiguity” and “potentially open the door for “broader tokenization strategies for Ripple,” he said.