Ripple (CRYPTO: XRP) told everyone it would slow down on acquisitions in 2026. Garlinghouse said it at the Swell conference last November, and he repeated it at the XRP Community Day in February.
He claimed that Ripple won’t be acquiring companies anymore in 2026, but rather integrating the $4 billion worth of companies it bought in 2025. Then Ripple bought Solvexia in January and announced the BC Payments deal in March, making it two acquisitions in under three months during what was supposed to be a quiet year.
Ripple is now valued at $50 billion after a $750 million share buyback and holds 75 regulatory licenses across the globe. Garlinghouse has openly said he wants Ripple to be the first trillion-dollar crypto company, and that might be why they keep buying firms. If you’re holding XRP and wondering where all this is heading, the question worth asking is what Ripple is still missing despite the enormous buying spree.
What Has Ripple Built Through Acquisitions?
The XRP community knows about the Hidden Road and GTreasury acquisitions, but the full list of what Ripple has bought since 2023 says a lot about where the company is headed. None of these firms Ripple bought were crypto companies. They were all traditional finance businesses that Ripple is now rebuilding around XRP.
| Company | Year | Price | Features |
| Metaco | 2023 | $250M | Institutional-grade digital asset custody used by global banks |
| Hidden Road | 2025 | $1.25B | Multi-asset prime brokerage clearing $3T/year for 300+ institutions |
| Rail | 2025 | $200M | Stablecoin settlement infrastructure powering 10%+ of B2B stablecoin payments |
| GTreasury | 2025 | $1B | Corporate treasury platform serving 1,000+ clients across 160 countries |
| Palisade | 2025 | Undisclosed | Digital asset custody and wallet services across Europe |
| Solvexia | 2026 | Undisclosed | No-code financial automation for reconciliation and regulatory reporting |
| BC Payments | 2026 | Undisclosed | Regulated payments license in Australia |
Hidden Road is now Ripple Prime, which is the first crypto-owned global prime brokerage in the world. Institutional traders can access leverage, clearing, and financing across both traditional and digital markets through a single Ripple product.
GTreasury became Ripple Treasury and now has native digital asset support, letting corporate treasurers hold and manage XRP and RLUSD alongside their fiat balances for the first time. Ripple now controls how institutions trade and how corporations move money—two areas where no other crypto company has a direct presence.
Ripple spent roughly $4 billion across these deals in 2025, then added Solvexia for financial automation and BC Payments for a regulated payments license, in the first three months of 2026. The company has gone from being a cross-border payments startup to controlling custody, prime brokerage, treasury management, stablecoin settlement, and regulatory licensing in over 75 jurisdictions.
That is the full stack a bank or asset manager would need to operate in digital assets, and Ripple has built it in under three years through acquisitions rather than trying to develop each piece from scratch.
What Is Still Missing From Ripple’s Playbook?
Ripple can now handle custody, prime brokerage, treasury management, stablecoin settlement, and cross-border payments through one stack, but it still can’t offer clients their own compliance tools. Ripple’s own survey of over 1,000 finance leaders last month found that 40% think regulatory compliance is their biggest concern when choosing a digital asset partner.
The company holds 75 licenses globally and recently integrated Chainalysis into Ripple Custody for real-time transaction screening. But it’s just a partnership, so Ripple doesn’t own the compliance technology. It still depends on a third-party vendor for one of the most critical parts of the institutional stack. Having such a feature and offering it directly to clients is exactly what 71% of corporates in the survey said they want—a single provider that covers everything.
Garlinghouse ruled out buying a crypto exchange at Swell in November 2025, so compliance and regulatory infrastructure are the more likely targets. Asides from the compliance gap there’s also a geographic question. Both 2026 acquisitions have been in Australia and Ripple’s Asia-Pacific payment volume doubled in 2025. There’s still Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East corridors, where Ripple Payments is already processing transactions, but through third-party relationships.
Ripple doesn’t own the infrastructure in any of those regions yet. Acquiring a licensed fintech or payment processor in one of those markets would give Ripple the same direct access it now has in Australia. And given how aggressively the company has been buying despite promising to slow down, a deal like that before the end of 2026 would not be surprising.
Will the Next Ripple Acquisition Matter for XRP?
Ripple’s acquisitions have made the company worth $50 billion, but most of the institutions using its infrastructure are settling in RLUSD and fiat without touching XRP. On-Demand Liquidity—the one Ripple product that actually creates demand for the token—is used in a handful of corridors, but it hasn’t been switched on at the scale needed to move the XRP price.
The CLARITY Act is what determines whether the $190 billion in new partnership volume Ripple has signed up flows through XRP or stays entirely in stablecoins. More deals will make Ripple a bigger company, but the XRP price only moves when the token is part of the settlement, not just the ecosystem around it. Until that changes, Ripple’s growth and XRP’s price will keep moving in different directions.
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