The price of ripple (XRP) has barely moved today amid a stagnant market, with its current level of USD 0.336641 representing a 0.5% fall in the last hour and a 0% move in a day. At the same time, it's down by a very modest 0.3% in a week, up by 2.5% in a fortnight, and down by 10% in the last 30 days.

These are hardly awe-inspiring movements for a cryptocurrency that happens to be the seventh-biggest by market cap, yet crypto also happens to find itself in hardly awe-inspiring macroeconomic conditions at the moment. Global stock markets have fallen in the face of negative inflation data, while Ripple continues to fight a nearly two-year-long legal battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the US, something which conspires to keep XRP's price suppressed.

Nonetheless, hope for a long-awaited end to this legal case has increased in the past 24 hours, after the presiding US court approved joint scheduling proposals concerning the redaction of parts of key SEC documents. When combined with other positive developments and rulings for Ripple over the past year, this suggests that a positive end to this legal tussle may be near, and that XRP could explode as a result.

The latest judgment in the Ripple-SEC case has come from Judge Torres, who has delivered several other rulings viewed favorably by people in the Ripple camp in previous months. In this particular instance, she simply approved a plan that had been jointly agreed by Ripple and the SEC, setting out a schedule for summary judgments on key parts of the case.

As illustrated in the tweet below from attorney James K. Filan, this schedule runs from now to the end of December. This likely means that the case will not end until the beginning of 2023 at the very