Ripple’s latest round of funding is an unusual success for a company that has long been the subject of legal battles and disputes.
On November 5, the company announced a $500 million strategic investment at a $40 billion valuation, backed by funds affiliated with Citadel Securities, Fortress Investment Group, and Brevan Howard. These are traditional financial institutions that are unlikely to recapitalize unless their size, revenue trajectory, and regulatory regime are clear.
Following this news, XRP’s value rose slightly to $2.30, continuing a quiet resurgence that began months after hitting an all-time high of $3.65 in July.
However, price trends hardly captured the truth. What mattered was not the movement on the charts, but the unmistakable message that some of the most sophisticated financial institutions believe Ripple has created an asset-agnostic financial infrastructure that can expand beyond the crypto industry.
Ripple attracts Wall Street
The most notable detail about Ripple’s funding round wasn’t its size. This was the structure.
Citadel Securities, one of the world’s largest market makers for stocks. Fortress Investment Group, a pioneer in alternative credit strategies. Brevan Howard, one of the world’s most successful macro trading firms, represents financial institutions that make very few symbolic bets.
Their participation shows a clear change. Ripple, once seen as a crypto company with competing legitimacy, is now valued as an infrastructure provider and system-level player building components that resemble parts of a traditional securities stack.
Ripple’s recent acquisition spree helps explain its appeal. The company spent $1.25 billion to acquire Hidden Road, a global prime broker that processes more than $3 trillion in annual payments across FX and digital assets.
The deal, now rebranded as Ripple Prime, instantly establishes Ripple as the first crypto-native company to operate a multi-asset prime brokerage platform. This also gave Ripple something that its crypto competitors cannot claim. It is integrated clearing, funding and brokerage across FX, cryptocurrencies and soon stablecoins.
At the same time, Ripple also strengthened its custody and treasury capabilities by acquiring digital asset custody companies Palisade and GTreasury for $1 billion and Rail for $200 million.
Together, these businesses provide Ripple with a comprehensive product ecosystem that mirrors the workflow of institutional customers: custodial → treasury → payments → trading → lending. It’s structured more and more like State Street and BNY Mellon, both powered by blockchain.
This is no longer a speculative bet on tokens for deep-pocketed macro funds seeking exposure to the next phase of digital finance. Rather, it is a strategic investment in a growing industry. This is a bet on infrastructure with revenue, scale and regulatory foothold.
XRPL finds a second life
Ripple’s focus on institutional infrastructure is changing the perception of XRP and the XRP Ledger (XRPL) across the financial sector.
Once overshadowed by new smart contract platforms, XRPL is regaining relevance as its core properties such as deterministic finality, consistent throughput, and 10 years of uninterrupted uptime closely align with what banks and payment networks want from their payment systems.
This collaboration was further strengthened with the introduction of RLUSD, Ripple’s fully reserved, NYDFS-regulated stablecoin.
Since its launch in late 2024, RLUSD has grown to over $1 billion in circulation, with XRPL serving as the primary payment ledger.
As a result, this combination is changing the way institutional investors view the Ripple ecosystem. In this community, XRPL provides reliability, RLUSD provides account units, and XRP provides native liquidity and consensus stability to keep the system operational.
In fact, this architecture represents a substantial change in the role of XRP. Rather than acting as a standalone speculative asset, XRP now sits deep within Ripple’s institutional stack as a coordination mechanism that ensures throughput and predictable transaction costs.
So, as stablecoins and tokenized deposits become central to regulated payments, XRPL’s once overlooked technical features have become a competitive advantage, amplified by XRP and RLUSD.
This change is evident through Ripple’s new partnerships with Mastercard, Webbank, and Gemini. The companies are exploring how RLUSD on XRPL can support the settlement of fiat card transactions using stablecoins.
For Ripple, the integration has two strategic implications.
- This validates XRPL as a suitable ledger for regulated, high-throughput stablecoin payments.
- We embed XRP deep into our systems as an asset that ensures ledger consensus and liquidity.
Monica Long, president of Ripple, said:
“This partnership is a meaningful step in demonstrating how regulated digital assets like RLUSD can power payments, paving the way for other card programs to adopt stablecoins to enable faster, more compliant payments. XRPL will serve as the backbone for these and other institutional use cases that transform the way financial services operate.”
XRP’s redefined identity
All of this points to Ripple’s transformation being more of an architectural overhaul than a pivot. We have moved from advocating blockchain payments to building market infrastructure that blurs the line between traditional finance and digital assets.
With prime brokerage, custody, treasury management, and stablecoin payments under one umbrella, Ripple’s product stack resembles the operational backbone of a traditional financial institution.
This evolution explains why Wall Street money is quietly but decisively getting into this issue. Ripple offers exposure to regulated stablecoins, institutional payment flows, and a ledger with a trusted technology history.
In this reconfigured environment, XRP will be valued less by its narrative momentum and more by its function within the broader payments system.
If Ripple executes on its roadmap, XRP’s long-term trajectory will be tied to utility rather than market cycles. RLUSD adoption, card network integration, and institutional payments volume will determine asset relevance.
The company’s $40 billion valuation, new investor profile, and infrastructure currently being built all point to areas where cryptocurrencies and traditional finance are increasingly overlapping.
In that context, XRP is no longer a relic of early blockchain experiments. This will be the functional and core infrastructure of the system Ripple is building.
