Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said in a Fox Business interview that the company has deployed roughly $4 billion on acquisitions, investments, and mergers since 2023, accelerating its push into institutional finance. He positioned Ripple as core infrastructure linking traditional markets with digital assets.
“Ripple has been very focused on how we build bridges between what we’ve called traditional finance and decentralized finance or crypto. And those bridges are kind of the core of where our products sit,” Garlinghouse explained. Institutional clients — hedge funds, banks, and multinational corporations — are seeking unified platforms to manage foreign exchange, derivatives, digital assets, liquidity, and settlement in one place, he noted.
Two Key Deals: Hidden Road and GTreasury
Two acquisitions anchor Ripple’s institutional push: the $1.25 billion purchase of Hidden Road (rebranded as Ripple Prime) and the $1 billion acquisition of GTreasury (now Ripple Treasury). The former strengthens prime brokerage capabilities; the latter adds treasury management. Ripple is integrating its RLUSD stablecoin and XRP into corporate treasury workflows, enabling real-time settlement without requiring companies to manage their own crypto wallets.
Speaking at an online XRP Community Day event, Garlinghouse detailed the capital allocation: roughly $4 billion flowed into the crypto ecosystem last year through investments, mergers, and acquisitions. He described how multinational treasurers often oversee hundreds of millions of dollars across multiple currencies and jurisdictions, creating foreign exchange exposure and idle capital in low-yield accounts. Ripple is developing a CFO dashboard to unify visibility across fiat accounts, stablecoins, and other digital assets while supporting hedging, payments, and yield optimization.
CEO: Slow Down Before Speeding Up
Asked whether Ripple expects to pursue additional acquisitions, Garlinghouse indicated the company will focus on integrating recent purchases before accelerating new deals. “I’m incredibly excited by the direction of travel we’re seeing. Both of those acquisitions are way ahead of our forecast when we bought them. So, we’re very happy with that,” he said. “But for the time being, we’re going to slow down for a minute before we speed up.” The remarks suggest Ripple will not sign major M&A agreements in the near term, dedicating resources to integrating Hidden Road and GTreasury.
As more institutions evaluate bitcoin and other digital assets for balance sheet exposure, Ripple aims to position itself as core infrastructure linking traditional finance with blockchain-based systems. Garlinghouse has also expressed a bullish view on the Clarity Act passage probability — he sees 90% odds by April, higher than prediction markets — though that topic was not the focus of this interview.