Freed from its SEC lawsuit, Ripple, long a blockchain payments company with little actual business, is finally acquiring its way toward a legitimate multibillion-dollar crypto empire.
Readers might recall our March 2024 feature on “zombie blockchains”—that’s how we christened at least 50 billion-dollar crypto projects sustained mostly by speculation rather than any real usage. Ripple, with its XRP token and an unfulfilled dream of replacing global bank messaging service SWIFT, topped that list with a market value of $36 billion but annual fees of only $583,000.
But lately, Ripple has been on a tear. In private markets, the company’s shares now trade between $135 and $170, roughly 2–3x higher than at the start of the year, valuing it between $22 billion and $30 billion. For context, that’s nearly on par with Circle, the stablecoin issuer Ripple wants to compete with and tried to acquire before it IPOd in June, which sits around $34 billion. Circle’s stock itself is up 352% from its June 5 IPO. Ripple’s token XRP, which does not grant an ownership stake in the company, is up 366% year-over-year with a market cap near $150 billion.
Ripple is also now part of the roaring digital asset treasury trend. Multiple firms have announced treasury strategies around XRP in recent weeks—most notably Evernorth, which aims to raise more than $1 billion. The idea that companies would even consider storing a token created by a company that has long struggled for business traction is a great vote of confidence.
This is a published version of our weekly Forbes Crypto Confidential newsletter. Sign up here to get it days earlier free in your inbox.
It’s not all that surprising given the end of Ripple’s 5-year legal battle with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC sued Ripple in 2020, alleging the firm sold XRP as an unregistered security; the resolution cost Ripple a $125 million fine. Plus, a streak of high-profile acquisitions, including GTreasury (a treasury management software provider) for $1 billion, Hidden Road (a prime brokerage) for $1.25 billion and Rail (a stablecoin payments platform) for $200 million. In 2023 and 2024, Ripple also bought custodians Metaco for $250 million and Standard Custody for an undisclosed amount.
While the XRP Ledger may still lag behind more popular blockchains in terms of app usage and developer activity, it is clear Ripple the company is a very different beast than what it was just a year ago.
“Sometimes people view change as bad. I think that’s actually a sign of health and greatness, especially in emerging technologies,” says Joe Naggar, CEO and CIO of crypto hedge fund Feynman Point Asset Management, which is also an investor in Ripple.
“Ripple is showing thoughtfulness to the capital stack that they weren’t able to fully demonstrate because of regulatory overhang,” he adds. “I think it’s actually a poster child for what happens when you don’t have a very difficult legislative and regulatory environment, and that thoughtfulness makes them different from all the other protocols with large treasuries—those that have foundations who lack real leadership and don’t know who they are serving. If you ask Brad Garlinghouse (Ripple’s CEO), the answer is very clear to him—his shareholders.”
Naggar thinks the better comp for Ripple today isn’t Circle or another blockchain, but Coinbase, which also operates custody and prime brokerage businesses and shares revenue with Circle.
Austin King, CEO of crypto trading firm Nomina (he also sold his first company to Ripple in 2019), goes even further: “A lot of people in crypto chirp Ripple, but the reality is that they had incredible foresight. Their technology has been there for a decade. Now their bet, I think, is to find synergies across all these different businesses, bundling them all up into one conglomerate for financial services.”
So the next big question for Ripple is whether it can turn its acquisitions into a unified system that actually drives value back to Ripple’s core technology, the XRP Ledger.
Read the full article here