At XRP Community Day, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse made his vision clear: XRP is the “North Star” of everything the company is building. Despite the brutal crypto market conditions that have pushed XRP down 60% from its peak to around $1.44, Garlinghouse is doubling down on a strategy that’s turned Ripple into crypto’s most aggressive acquirer in 2025.
Over the past year, Ripple has spent roughly $4 billion buying up companies across the financial infrastructure stack. Some analysts are comparing the strategy to Amazon’s playbook—building a comprehensive ecosystem where everything works together, with XRP and Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin serving as the settlement backbone.
For 2026, Garlinghouse says the focus shifts from buying companies to actually integrating them. That suggests he’s confident in what Ripple has assembled: a vertically integrated operation covering prime brokerage, treasury management, stablecoin payments, and custody services. The company now serves over 300 institutional clients handling trillions of dollars in transactions annually.
Breaking Down the Shopping Spree
Ripple’s acquisition strategy has been methodical and expensive:
Hidden Road (April, $1.25 billion) was the crown jewel—now rebranded as Ripple Prime. This prime brokerage brings institutional-grade clearing and collateral management to the table, processing about $3 trillion in annual volume. The key strategic element: it now uses RLUSD stablecoin, creating built-in demand for Ripple’s own token.
Rail (August, $200 million) handles business-to-business stablecoin payments around the clock. They’re processing over 10% of the $36 billion stablecoin payment market and settling transactions through the XRP Ledger. This helps businesses use stablecoins for payments while reducing their direct exposure to cryptocurrency volatility.
GTreasury (October, $1 billion, now called Ripple Treasury) brought serious corporate finance capabilities—risk management tools, foreign exchange hedging, compliance systems, and audit trails. These are exactly the features Fortune 500 companies need before they’ll touch crypto infrastructure.
Palisade (November, price undisclosed) rounded out the stack by adding hot wallet services for high-speed operations, complementing the cold storage solutions for long-term custody.
The Strategic Thesis
Garlinghouse describes Ripple’s evolution bluntly: the company has moved “beyond payments into multifaceted infrastructure.” To fund this expansion, Ripple raised $500 million from heavyweight investors including Citadel, Pantera, Galaxy, Brevan Howard, and Marshall Wace, valuing the company at $40 billion.
The numbers suggest real traction. Ripple Payments has processed $95 billion across 75 regulatory licenses globally. RLUSD crossed $1 billion in market cap within its first year. Ripple Prime has doubled the client collateral under management since the acquisition closed. All told, Ripple has completed six acquisitions in two years, with two of them exceeding $1 billion each—a level of financial firepower most crypto companies can’t match.
How XRP Fits In
Here’s where things get interesting for XRP holders. Garlinghouse is positioning these acquisitions as “validation of XRP’s future” by creating what he calls ecosystem lock-in.
Hidden Road now requires RLUSD collateral across its product suite, generating internal demand for Ripple’s token. Rail settles payments via XRP specifically for speed and cost advantages. Treasury management workflows are optimized for cross-border flows using the XRP Ledger, which can finalize transactions in 3-5 seconds.
The logic is that once these systems are deeply integrated, the switching costs become prohibitively expensive. Clients aren’t just using Ripple products—they’re embedded in an XRP-centric infrastructure.
Ripple also repurchased 25% of its outstanding shares through a 2025 tender offer, which aligns company incentives more directly with token performance.
The Amazon Comparison
Crypto analyst Jake Claver drew an explicit parallel to Amazon’s business model: “AWS became most profitable via owned stack.” Just as Amazon Web Services became hugely valuable by owning the entire cloud infrastructure layer, Ripple is trying to own the full financial infrastructure stack for crypto.
Hidden Road provides the prime brokerage plumbing. Rail enables the payments marketplace. GTreasury owns the corporate treasury workflow. Palisade handles operational wallet infrastructure. If this strategy works, some analysts project Ripple could reach $180 billion in enterprise value—far beyond Coinbase’s $50 billion peak valuation.
Reality Check
Of course, there are significant challenges. XRP’s 60% decline is actually worse than Bitcoin’s 48% drop year-to-date. The SEC appeal still casts a shadow over XRP despite the legal clarity achieved in 2023. And RLUSD is competing against deeply entrenched stablecoins like Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC, which have massive network effects and liquidity.
Garlinghouse dismissed the bearish sentiment, saying the “integration phase now drives compounding value” and that 2026 execution will prove the thesis. He’s pointing to institutional momentum: 300+ clients onboarded, $95 billion in payment volumes, and trillion-dollar-scale prime brokerage operations.
Competitive Positioning
If this works, Ripple leapfrogs competitors who are stuck in single-product categories. Traditional payment systems like SWIFT face potential disruption from Ripple’s claimed 80% cost savings. And the stablecoin wars are intensifying, with Ripple betting that RLUSD’s compliance infrastructure gives it an edge.
Real-world adoption is starting to materialize. Direct-to-consumer brands in India are looking at Ripple Treasury for foreign exchange hedging. Family offices in the UAE are adopting the prime services. Investment funds in Singapore are using the custody solutions.
The Bottom Line
Garlinghouse’s “North Star” language signals strong conviction that XRP will anchor utility across massive financial flows. As the crypto winter continues testing everyone’s resolve, Ripple’s $4 billion acquisition bet is positioning the company for what it hopes will be dominant market share when conditions improve.
This wasn’t just spending money for growth metrics—Ripple is trying to build genuine competitive moats through vertical integration. The company is now institutionally hardened with serious enterprise customers and a comprehensive product stack.
Whether XRP bulls are right to accumulate or bears are correct to remain skeptical will depend on execution. But one thing is clear: Ripple is redefining what enterprise crypto infrastructure looks like, and they’re backing that vision with serious capital. The question now is whether the integration actually delivers the compounding value Garlinghouse is promising, or whether this ends up being an expensive bet made at the wrong time in the market cycle.
