Ripple: “We’re Not Boring Enough for Wall Street!” 😂

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Markets

What to know:

  • Ripple’s CEO, Monica Long, has declared war on IPOs, preferring to stay private while spending billions on acquisitions. Who needs public markets when you have a balance sheet thicker than a college textbook? 📖💸
  • In November 2025, they raised $500 million at a $40 billion valuation. Investors included Citadel Securities and Fortress Investment Group-basically, the “I’ll take crypto over my kids” crowd. 🤷
  • Ripple spent nearly $4 billion on four companies in 2025, including one named “Rail.” Spoiler: It’s not a train company. It’s a stablecoin payments platform. Still weird. 🚂➡️💳

Ripple has no plans to pursue an initial public offering, President Monica Long said, reiterating that the company prefers to stay private as it expands through acquisitions and product development. When asked if they were avoiding the IPO circus, Long shrugged and said, “We’re just not that desperate for attention.” 🎭

“Currently, we still plan to remain private,” Long said in a Tuesday interview with Bloomberg, arguing Ripple does not need the liquidity or capital access that typically drives IPO decisions. Translation: “We’re rich enough to buy our own island. Why would we let strangers own a piece of us?” 🏝️

She said the company is well-positioned to fund growth internally without relying on public markets. If only everyone could say that after a $500 million round. “We’re like the kid who brought a juice box to the wine tasting.” 🥤🍷

The comments follow Ripple’s $500 million raise in November 2025 at a reported $40 billion valuation. For context, that’s enough to buy 800,000,000 lattes. Or, you know, a small country. 🏰☕

The round included investors such as Fortress Investment Group and Citadel Securities, as well as other crypto-focused funds. Long described the deal terms as “very positive” and “very favorable” for Ripple when asked about protections reportedly included for investors, such as the right to sell shares back to the company at a guaranteed price and preferential treatment in certain downside scenarios, though she did not provide further detail. Classic corporate speak for “We’re confident we’ll never fail… probably.” 🤞

A year of aggressive dealmaking

In 2025, the company completed four acquisitions, including multi-asset prime broker Hidden Road (sounds like a spy’s LinkedIn), stablecoin payments platform Rail (still not a train), treasury management system provider GTreasury (because “Treasury” isn’t dramatic enough), and digital asset wallet and custody firm Palisade (just a fancy name for “vault”).

The deals, totaling nearly $4 billion, are part of Ripple’s broader push to position itself as an end-to-end provider of enterprise digital asset infrastructure. As of last November, Ripple Payments had processed more than $95 billion in total volume. Ripple Prime, built around the acquisition of Hidden Road, has expanded into collateralized lending and institutional XRP products. Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, RLUSD, sits at the center of both business lines, tying together payments, liquidity, custody, and settlement. It’s like a buffet for bankers. 🍽️

“The whole strategy of our company is to create products,” Long said, adding that Ripple is focused on building the connective tissue traditional finance needs to make stablecoins, tokenized assets and crypto rails usable in real-world workflows. In other words: “We’re solving problems no one knew they had.” 🤯

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2026-01-07 17:34