Invisible Giants in the Stablecoin Industry

In 2025, Ripple announced three major acquisitions: $1.25 billion for Hidden Road, $200 million for Rail, and $1 billion for GTreasury. The total disclosed consideration amounts to $2.45 billion.

Why would a cross-border payment company simultaneously acquire a Prime Broker, a stablecoin payment platform, and a Treasury Management System?

When you consider the lifecycle of money in these three transactions, the answer becomes clear: Rail connects the inflow and outflow of funds, Hidden Road provides the credit and financing behind institutional trading, and GTreasury enters the system where enterprises decide how to manage and use their funds. Coupled with Ripple's existing custody business and the US dollar stablecoin RLUSD, a framework for institutional financial infrastructure begins to emerge.

Ripple is gradually transforming the account arrangements, asset security, liquidity, credit, and enterprise workflows that stablecoins rely on into services it can provide.

This is also why I believe it has won an important battle. It has acquired a set of real businesses, customer relationships, and institutional service capabilities, allowing it to participate in decisions about how stablecoins are used and who earns the revenue generated from those uses.

To understand Ripple today, one must extend the timeline. The intensive mergers and acquisitions of 2025 are a concentrated release of over a decade of accumulation and adjustment.

1. From XRP to Banks: What Problem Did Ripple Initially Aim to Solve?

The story of Ripple begins with the relationship between the company and the network.

XRPL went live in June 2012. In September of the same year, a team including Chris Larsen and Jed McCaleb founded the company, initially named NewCoin, which quickly changed to OpenCoin, later becoming Ripple Labs, and eventually abbreviated to Ripple. The founding team of XRPL also donated a large amount of XRP to the company, which closely linked Ripple to the development and holding of XRP from the early days.

When discussing it today, at least four entities must be distinguished:

Ripple: A company providing enterprise financial services and technology. Analysis should focus on customers, products, revenue, profits, and capital allocation.

XRP: The native digital asset of XRPL. Analysis should focus on use cases, liquidity, supply and demand, and value capture.

XRPL: A public blockchain network. Analysis should focus on transactions, asset issuance, settlement, and ecosystem development.

RLUSD: The US dollar stablecoin issued by Ripple's entity. Analysis should focus on reserves, redemption, distribution, and actual use.

Holding XRP does not represent holding equity in Ripple; the growth of Ripple's business, the growth of XRPL's usage, and the market demand for XRP need to be analyzed separately.

In its early years, Ripple targeted the efficiency problem in cross-border payments.

A payment institution often needs to arrange funds in advance through banks and partners to make payments in multiple markets. Money is scattered across different accounts, constrained by time zones, business hours, settlement cycles, and local rules. Before the business even occurs, liquidity may already be occupied.

By 2017, Ripple's product portfolio had broken down different issues in payments: xCurrent handled payment information and institutional collaboration, xRapid used XRP to obtain cross-border liquidity, and xVia provided standardized access. Later, xRapid evolved into On-Demand Liquidity, or ODL.

The path of XRP as a Bridge Asset is straightforward: convert the outgoing currency to XRP, transfer it cross-border, and then convert it to the receiving currency to reduce the need for long-term pre-funding at the destination.

It touches on real pain points. However, efficiently delivering funds to customers still requires sufficiently deep markets on both ends, continuously quoting liquidity providers, reliable bank accounts, compliant counterparties, and clear transaction responsibilities.

On-chain transfers are just one part of the process. What customers ultimately care about is whether the money can be used after it arrives, what the total cost is, and who is responsible in case of anomalies.

Faster asset transfers can change the way liquidity is allocated; the costs of funds, risk-bearing, and last-mile delivery still need someone to address.

Ripple has been addressing these conditions for a long time. The $55 million Series B funding in 2016 brought in investors such as Standard Chartered, SBI, Accenture Ventures, and SCB Digital Ventures under Thailand's Siam Commercial Bank; in 2018, it launched Xpring to support XRP and XRPL-related projects through investments, incubation, acquisitions, and funding; in 2019, it invested in Bitso to support the Latin American liquidity network; and in 2021, it announced the acquisition of a 40% stake in Tranglo to expand cross-border payment connections in Asia.

Thus, building an ecosystem with capital has always been Ripple's strategy. The change is that in its early years, it primarily focused on payment corridors and the use of XRP, but later began to enter more comprehensive institutional financial services.

2. Under Regulatory Pressure, It Began to Expand Its Business Boundaries

In 2020, the SEC filed a lawsuit against Ripple. By August 2025, both parties withdrew their appeals, and the case came to a close; a civil fine of approximately $125 million and an injunction against violating securities registration regulations remained in effect.

This history changed Ripple's development environment and left a case worth studying for its early business.

MoneyGram had accepted investment from Ripple and used related technology, but the two ended their partnership in 2021. MoneyGram's SEC filings disclosed that in 2020, it included $50.2 million in related party market development fees from Ripple.

It reminds us that when evaluating the adoption of a financial technology, one must distinguish between demand formed by customer payments, demand driven by commercial incentives, and business volume supported by capital relationships. All three can coexist, but their sustainability differs.

However, Ripple's subsequent layout cannot simply be written as "after the lawsuit ended, it began large-scale acquisitions."

In May 2023, it acquired Metaco for $250 million; in June 2024, it completed the acquisition of Standard Custody & Trust Company. Both transactions occurred before the lawsuit was finally resolved.

Metaco provided institutional custody technology and customer relationships, while Standard Custody provided an important organizational foundation for regulated trust entities and stablecoin business.

When banks and asset managers enter digital assets, they first need an operational control system: who holds the private keys, who initiates transactions, who reviews them, how permissions and limits are set, and how to isolate assets, reconcile, maintain records, and handle anomalies.

Metaco allows Ripple to enter these institutional processes. Once custody technology is embedded in bank systems, there is an opportunity to form ongoing service relationships; the adoption of technology by banks does not mean that their customers' assets become Ripple's own assets.

Standard Custody allows Ripple to advance new business based on a limited-purpose trust company regulated by the state of New York. When the acquisition was completed, Jack McDonald also took on the role of head of Ripple's stablecoin business.

On December 17, 2024, RLUSD officially launched, initially issued on XRPL and Ethereum.

At this point, Ripple's product offerings have clearly expanded: it can provide liquidity paths related to XRP, as well as US dollar stablecoins and the custody capabilities to hold these assets. Customers can choose solutions based on currency, corridors, and internal policies.

This represents an important strategic adjustment: the financial businesses the company can participate in have begun to exceed the applicability of a single bridging asset path.

3. Acquisitions in 2025: Connecting Funds, Credit, and Enterprise Workflows

In 2025, Ripple began to purchase key business capabilities at a larger price.

This year's acquisitions of Hidden Road, Rail, and GTreasury brought it into three different fee positions: institutional financing and clearing, fund collection and conversion, and enterprise Treasury software and workflows.

Hidden Road: Entering the Credit and Collateral Network

When the acquisition was announced, Hidden Road disclosed that it clears approximately $30 trillion annually and serves over 300 institutional clients. Ripple had already participated in its Series B financing before the acquisition and was also a platform client. This transaction has a visible advancement path: first invest and use, then expand capital commitment.

After the deal closed in October 2025, Hidden Road was renamed Ripple Prime. At that time, Ripple disclosed that RLUSD was used as collateral for some Prime Brokerage products, and some derivatives clients chose to hold balances in RLUSD.

The use of stablecoins thus expanded to Margin, Collateral, and financing arrangements.

In payment scenarios, a stablecoin may flow in and out quickly; in collateral scenarios, institutions may continuously hold balances to maintain positions and obtain services. The two correspond to different holding motivations and may form different balance accumulations.

If a stablecoin can be accepted by trading and financing networks, customers have another reason to hold it: this asset can support their financial activities.

Hidden Road brings Ripple the ability to provide credit, clearing, and financing services around funds, and also provides RLUSD with deeper institutional use cases.

The $30 trillion mentioned here is still the multi-asset clearing volume disclosed at that time and cannot be directly considered as RLUSD payment volume, nor does it represent that all related business has migrated to XRPL.

Rail: Integrating On-Chain Capabilities into Fiat Fund Processes

Rail brings virtual accounts, collections, fiat and stablecoin conversions, as well as third-party payments and enterprise Treasury flows.

For PSPs, these capabilities correspond to daily operational issues: how customer money comes in, who identifies it, how it is aggregated, when it is exchanged, who it can be paid to, and how underlying transaction data is transmitted.

Enterprises can complete collections and payments in fiat currency, with service providers using stablecoins to arrange funds in between. Thus, customers are purchasing a funding service and do not necessarily need to manage wallets, exchange accounts, and on-chain operations themselves.

The acquisition of Palisade in November 2025 supplemented operational capabilities such as Wallet-as-a-Service, wallet configuration, and transaction signing. By March 2026, Ripple had described the integration of Rail and Palisade in its product announcements: receiving payments through named virtual accounts and wallets, holding, exchanging, and paying out fiat or stablecoins on the same platform.

This brings Ripple's payment products closer to a deliverable funding operation service. The specific account structure, third-party funds, and customer scope will still be executed according to the contracting entities, local rules, and approvals from partner banks.

The strategic value of Rail is to connect stablecoins with the account arrangements, collection, and payment processes that customers truly use.

GTreasury: Entering the Place Where Enterprises Decide How to Use Money

In my view, GTreasury is the most significant long-term transaction in this group. (The most undervalued acquisition of 2025, a key turning point for stablecoin enterprise applications) The acquisition announcement states that it serves over 1,000 clients across 160 countries. Ripple confirmed the acquisition was completed in December 2025.

The Treasury system participates daily in corporate cash visualization, cash forecasting, payment approvals, FX exposure, financing, and investment. It connects banks, ERP, approval permissions, and audit records, and also undertakes a large amount of existing corporate budgets.

When a company decides to use stablecoins, the issues to be resolved go far beyond initiating an on-chain transaction: how accounting handles it, who can operate it, how limits are set, how bank cash and on-chain balances are merged, and how funding forecasts are updated.

GTreasury gives Ripple the opportunity to enter clients from where these issues arise.

In April 2026, Ripple Treasury launched Digital Account Management and Unified Treasury, integrating digital asset balances, valuations, transaction records, and fiat position views into the same system. The announcement disclosed that this Treasury platform assisted clients in processing $13 trillion in payment volume in 2025.

This figure reflects the scale of existing workflows, including traditional funding operations; it does not equate to stablecoin payment volume and cannot be directly added to the transaction volume of Ripple Payments.

From a strategic perspective, a more valuable question is: how many of these enterprises will access new services through existing systems when configuring cash, arranging cross-border payments, or handling internal group funds in the future?

In January 2026, Ripple Treasury acquired Solvexia, enhancing financial automation, reconciliation, and regulatory reporting. It continues to advance in the same direction: integrating digital assets into existing financial operations of enterprises rather than remaining in independent experiments for the long term.

IV. 2026: From M&A List to Institutional Adoption

In 2026, a batch of products and client progress began to emerge that could validate this layout.

In March, Ripple disclosed that Payments had processed over $100 billion cumulatively, covering over 60 major markets; in July, Ripple Mint was launched to provide institutions with RLUSD minting, redemption, and operational access, connecting fiat and on-chain transaction statuses through APIs, webhooks, and consistent reference numbers.

These capabilities make it easier for stablecoins to be incorporated into payment institutions, trading platforms, and internal systems of enterprises. For institutional clients, traceability, reconciliation, and automation directly impact usage scale.

As of October 8, 2026, Ripple's official website disclosed that the circulation of RLUSD was approximately $2.46 billion, with reserves of about $2.6 billion. It has formed a certain scale, but there is still a significant gap compared to the stock of USDT and USDC. Therefore, Ripple's importance in the stablecoin industry should also be assessed in conjunction with its comprehensive services around funding.

Another significant development with financial infrastructure implications occurred in the collateral network.

In January 2026, Ripple announced a multi-year collaboration with LMAX, where Ripple would provide $150 million in financing to promote the use of RLUSD in its institutional trading infrastructure. The announcement referred to it as financing and should be understood in the context of financing arrangements, not directly as an equity acquisition.

On October 12, Standard Chartered announced the launch of institutional custody for RLUSD on XRPL through its DIFC branch regulated by DFSA; simultaneously, it advanced collateral mirroring with Ripple and LMAX.

The goal of this arrangement is to map the value of eligible collateral to trading venues, allowing institutions to use assets while retaining bank custody, reducing the need to transfer them directly to trading venues. Custody has already gone live, but subsequent collateral linkage still requires documentation, testing, and related approvals.

This path is logical because institutions need to address asset custody, trading access, credit support, and counterparty exposure simultaneously. Stablecoins are entering a common solution for these issues.

There is also a noteworthy distinction in roles: BNY announced in 2025 that it would become the primary reserve custodian for RLUSD, serving the reserve assets that support issuance; Standard Chartered's aforementioned service holds the RLUSD tokens held by institutional clients. Reserve security, client asset custody, and trading venue collateral use are interconnected, each with its own boundaries of responsibility.

Ripple Prime is also expanding. In August 2026, it launched Delta One services, supporting total return swaps for U.S. listed stocks, indices, and digital assets; the company also disclosed that its regulatory net capital exceeded $1 billion and completed a $275 million private placement of unsecured notes.

In October, Brevan Howard expanded its cooperation with Ripple Prime, utilizing multi-asset prime brokerage, clearing, and financing services; DriveWealth announced integration around stablecoin settlement, cross-border inflows, and custody, and is exploring stock financing cooperation.

These businesses are at various stages of service provision, integration, or exploration. They clearly demonstrate a direction: the same institution can establish multiple service relationships with Ripple around funding, assets, and credit.

Ripple's product portfolio is beginning to show observable common customer scenarios.

V. Its Capital Network is Extending Around Use Cases

Ripple's investment and acquisitions need to be viewed alongside its shareholders, invested companies, and partners, but it is essential to distinguish their respective relationships.

In November 2025, Ripple announced a $500 million strategic equity investment, corresponding to a $40 billion valuation. Participants included funds managed by Fortress-affiliated institutions, Citadel Securities affiliates, as well as Pantera, Galaxy, Brevan Howard, and Marshall Wace.

In March 2026, CoinDesk cited insiders reporting that Ripple initiated a share buyback of up to $750 million, with transaction pricing corresponding to an estimated $50 billion valuation. The equity buyback provides liquidity to original shareholders and employees and should be understood separately from new financing.

Beyond these capital relationships, Ripple is also continuously investing in business nodes.

Regional payments and acceptance: Bitso, Tranglo. Corresponding to local funding networks and liquidity.

Market liquidity: Keyrock. Corresponding to market making, OTC, and trading services.

Trading infrastructure financing: LMAX. Corresponding to stablecoin collateral and settlement scenarios.

Funds and tokenization technology: ZILO, Licuido. Corresponding to registration, issuance, and collateral use.

In March 2026, Keyrock announced it had secured a Series C financing led by SC Ventures, with continued support from Ripple, reaching a valuation of $1.1 billion; in August, Ripple invested in ZILO and Licuido, extending relationships into fund share registration, issuance, and collateral liquidity, and proposed that RLUSD could bear the dollar cash leg in delivery-versus-payment.

Equity investments, financing, technology collaborations, and client contracts represent different rights and responsibilities. They can create business synergies but also require verification of commercial outcomes on a case-by-case basis.

Returning to Ripple's development context, the direction of this network is becoming increasingly focused: enabling institutions to hold assets, obtain liquidity, use credit, and complete related settlements through digital dollars.

Standard Chartered provides a meaningful time span: participating in Ripple financing in 2016 and providing RLUSD custody in 2026. One cannot solely explain product adoption based on shareholder relationships, but this decade illustrates that the accumulation of institutional relationships and service capabilities can span multiple market cycles.

VI. The Commercial Value of This Strategy, Where Does It Lie

I believe Ripple's importance primarily comes from its ability to participate in more businesses with clients, budgets, and reasons to pay.

Payments can charge around collections and exchanges; custody can charge around technology, operations, and asset services; Treasury software connects ongoing subscriptions and corporate workflows; prime brokerage provides clearing and financing services; RLUSD has additional reserve-related income. The actual attribution and scale of each income source depend on contracts and operating entities.

They correspond to different economic models and provide Ripple with various growth paths.

To make a rough assumption: if the average circulation of a stablecoin is $2.5 billion, and the annualized gross yield on reserves is 4%, it corresponds to about $100 million in gross interest per year, not accounting for distribution, custody, operational, and compliance costs. This is not Ripple's actual income, nor is it an interest rate forecast.

This magnitude indicates that understanding a company valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars requires incorporating its customer services, business portfolio, and capital resources into the analysis. It is challenging to make judgments based solely on stablecoin circulation.

Another advantage of Ripple is that these services can penetrate customer relationships of varying depths.

A single payment connects a transaction; a TMS participates in a company's daily funding decisions; custody and prime relationships involve asset security, credit conditions, and risk management. The deeper the service, the more systems, processes, and responsibilities need to be reassessed when clients switch suppliers.

If product integration can be executed well, existing clients may become entry points for other services. Clients also have reasons to reduce redundant access, duplicate reconciliations, and multi-party coordination.

This is the potential long-term value of the M&A portfolio: embedding multiple financial services into the ongoing business processes of clients, forming repeatable payment relationships.

However, integration also has its costs. Institutions may wish to retain options for multiple banks, multiple issuers, and multiple sources of liquidity to manage concentration. Ripple promotes its own assets while providing infrastructure, needing to clarify routing options, related transactions, pricing, and exit arrangements for clients.

Whether it can maintain sufficient openness while expanding its own business will affect the breadth of the client base this platform can ultimately serve.

Capital resources need to be analyzed separately. Ripple has previously disclosed significant XRP holdings and lock-up arrangements, which are important variables in understanding its financial resources. However, the market value of tokens, available cash, operating profits, and private equity transaction pricing each have different meanings. Existing public information is insufficient to accurately break down how much of the company valuation comes from XRP assets and how much comes from various operating businesses.

In the longer term, whether Ripple can convert these resources into sustainable client revenue and risk-adjusted returns remains to be seen.

VII. The Advantages Already Achieved, How to Verify Next

Ripple has completed significant business expansion and has begun to see cross-product institutional collaborations. These are verifiable progress.

Its licensing network is also expanding: in January 2026, it obtained EMI licensing and Cryptoasset Registration from the UK's FCA, and in July, it received full MiCA CASP authorization from Luxembourg's CSSF. The OCC granted preliminary conditional approval for the proposed national trust bank in December 2025, but it still needs to meet conditions and obtain final approval to commence operations. Different entities, products, and funding activities still have their own licensing and banking approval boundaries.

Based on these foundations, I will examine its subsequent performance with three sets of questions.

First, the quality of demand.

How much sustained balance and actual usage does RLUSD have among institutions with no investment ties? How much incentive is needed for trading volume growth? Do customers continue to use it after promotions end? The history of MoneyGram is worth converting into today's metrics for observing demand.

Second, the quality of integration.

Among the customers acquired, how many truly used the second and third services? Do Treasury customers access Payments, and do Prime customers use Custody? How do customer retention and unit operating costs change after service expansion? These are more indicative of synergy than just placing all logos in the same architecture diagram.

Third, the quality of capital.

After the expansion of financing and derivatives business, credit risk, funding costs, and liquidity requirements will rise simultaneously. Asset collateral discounts, concentration, and stress scenarios will directly affect returns. The stablecoin reserves and the group's other business equity and operating funds must also be clearly distinguished.

These questions also remind us to separate the company's development from XRP value capture. The issuance of RLUSD, software subscriptions, and financing income will not automatically convert proportionally into XRP demand; even if the business uses XRPL, how transaction fees and reserve demand interact with supply and holding willingness still needs to be analyzed separately.

My optimism about Ripple is based on a set of specific capabilities it has already achieved: payment network, institutional custody, regulated USD issuance, Prime Brokerage, and workflows entering corporate funding decisions.

Looking back at this timeline, its progress is quite layered: first solving cross-border fund transfers, then entering secure asset holding, subsequently providing digital dollars, and finally expanding into how funds are allocated, collateralized, and financed.

Ripple is already qualified to be an important participant in influencing the rules and business models of the institutional stablecoin market. Future operational results will determine how much value this combination can create.

This article is compiled based on publicly available information as of October 15, 2026. All amounts are in USD. The main materials include: Ripple official announcements (Hidden Road April 8, 2025, Rail August 7, 2025, GTreasury October 16, 2025, Palisade November 3, 2025, Ripple Prime delivery October 24, 2025, GTreasury delivery confirmation December 4, 2025, Solvexia January 6, 2026, payment platform expansion March 3, 2026, Ripple Mint July 23, 2026, Delta One August 27, 2026, Brevan Howard October 6, 2026, DriveWealth October 14, 2026, ZILO and Licuido August 3, 2026, $500 million strategic investment November 5, 2025, UK license January 9, 2026, MiCA CASP July 6, 2026, Metaco May 17, 2023, Standard Custody June 11, 2024, RLUSD launch December 16, 2024, Series B in 2016, Xpring in 2018, investment in Bitso in 2019, 40% stake in Tranglo in 2021, Q1 2025 XRP Markets Report), XRPL official statements regarding network history and its relationship with Ripple, SEC dismissal and final judgment documents (August 7, 2025), MoneyGram 2022 Form 10-K, BNY reserve custody announcement (July 9, 2025), Standard Chartered and Ripple's RLUSD institutional custody and collateral linkage announcement (October 12, 2026), LMAX cooperation announcement (January 15, 2026), FCA registration records, OCC preliminary conditional approval announcement (December 12, 2025), Keyrock Series C financing (March 31, 2026), Ripple RLUSD transparency page (using October 8, 2026 snapshot), CoinGecko market data, and relevant reports from Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, and CoinDesk. The RLUSD transparency page contains dynamic data; the business volume disclosed by the company retains its original timing and metrics; the meanings of stock buybacks, financing arrangements, and equity investments differ, and this article expresses them according to their respective natures. The comments in this article are analyses based on publicly available information and do not constitute investment advice.