Ripple’s latest funding round came with unusual force for a company long defined by lawsuits and contentious stories.
On November 5, the company announced a $500 million strategic investment at a $40 billion valuation, backed by funds associated with Citadel Securities, Fortress Investment Group and Brevan Howard. These are traditional financial institutions that rarely provide capital unless the operational footprint, revenue path and regulations are clear.
Following the news, the value of XRP rose slightly to $2.30, continuing a quiet rebound that began months after the value of
However, the price action hardly reflected the real story. What mattered wasn’t the movement on a chart, but the unmistakable message that some of the most sophisticated financial institutions believe Ripple has built an asset-agnostic financial infrastructure that can scale beyond the crypto industry.
Ripple attracts Wall Street
The most striking detail in Ripple’s funding round wasn’t its size. It was the composition.
Citadel Securities, one of the largest market makers in global equities; Fortress Investment Group, a pioneer in alternative credit strategies; and Brevan Howard, one of the most successful macro trading firms in the world, represent institutions that rarely make token bets.
Their participation indicates a clear shift. Ripple, once seen as a crypto company fighting for legitimacy, is valued as an infrastructure provider and a system-level player building components that resemble parts of the traditional securities stack.
Ripple’s recent acquisitions help explain its appeal. The company spent $1.25 billion to acquire Hidden Road, a global prime broker that unlocks more than $3 trillion annually in currencies and digital assets.
The deal, now rebranded as Ripple Prime, immediately positioned Ripple as the first crypto-native company to operate a multi-asset prime brokerage platform. It also gave Ripple something that no competitor in crypto can claim: unified clearing, financing and brokerage for FX, crypto and soon stablecoins.
At the same time, Ripple has also strengthened its custody and treasury capabilities through the acquisitions of Palisade, a digital asset custodian, and GTreasury for $1 billion, as well as Rail for $200 million.
Together, these companies give Ripple a holistic product ecosystem that mirrors the workflow of institutional clients: custody → treasury → settlement → trading → financing. It’s a structure that increasingly resembles a blockchain-powered State Street or BNY Mellon.
For deep-pocketed macro funds looking for exposure to the next phase of digital finance, this is no longer a speculative bet on a token. Instead, it is a strategic investment in a growing industry. It is a bet on infrastructure with revenue, scale and legal basis.
XRPL finds a second life
Ripple’s pivot towards institutional infrastructure is changing the way XRP and the XRP Ledger (XRPL) are perceived in the financial sector.
Once overshadowed by newer smart contract platforms,
That alignment has been further tightened 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 clearing ledger.
As a result, the combination changes the way institutional players view Ripple’s ecosystem. In this community, XRPL provides reliability, RLUSD a unit of account, and XRP provides the native liquidity and consensus stability that keep the system operational.
Indeed, this architecture marks a substantial shift in XRP’s role. Rather than acting as a standalone speculative asset, XRP now sits deeper in Ripple’s institutional stack as a coordination mechanism that guarantees throughput and predictable transaction fees.
As stablecoins and tokenized deposits become central to regulated settlement, XRPL’s once-overlooked technical profile has become a competitive advantage, with XRP and RLUSD strengthening it.
This shift is significantly pronounced by Ripple’s new partnership 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:
- It validates XRPL as a suitable ledger for regulated, high-throughput stablecoin settlement.
- It integrates XRP more deeply into the system as the asset that ensures ledger consensus and liquidity.
Monica Long, Chairman of Ripple, said:
“This partnership is a meaningful step toward demonstrating how regulated digital assets like RLUSD can improve settlement, paving the way for other card programs to use stablecoins for faster, compliant payments. The XRPL will serve as the backbone for these and other institutional use cases that transform the way financial services operate.”
The redefined identity of XRP
All this shows that Ripple’s transformation is less a pivot than an architectural overhaul. It has gone from advocating blockchain payments to building a market infrastructure that blurs the line between traditional finance and digital assets.
With prime brokerage, custody, treasury management, and stablecoin settlement under one umbrella, Ripple’s product stack resembles the operational backbone of a traditional financial institution.
This evolution explains why Wall Street funds are quietly but decisively coming into the picture. Ripple offers exposure to a regulated stablecoin, institutional settlement flows, and a ledger with a credible technical history.
XRP is valued in this reframed environment not for its narrative momentum, but for its function within a broader settlement system.
If Ripple executes its roadmap, XRP’s long-term trajectory will be tied to utilities, rather than market cycles. RLUSD adoption, card network integrations and institutional settlement volume will determine the asset’s relevance.
The company’s $40 billion valuation, the profile of its new investors, and the infrastructure now being built all point toward a sector where crypto and traditional finance increasingly overlap.
In that landscape, XRP is no longer a relic of early blockchain experiments. It will be an infrastructure that would be functional and central to the system Ripple is building.
