Ripple’s $100B IPO? Deaton Foresees Record-Shattering Valuation

Move over, traditional finance—Ripple's rumored IPO might just rewrite the rulebook.

The $100 Billion Question

Crypto legal eagle John Deaton drops a bombshell prediction: Ripple could hit a $100 billion valuation post-IPO. That’d put it in the same league as some of Silicon Valley’s most inflated unicorns—but with actual revenue streams.

Wall Street’s Worst Nightmare

While bankers polish their pitch decks for yet another SaaS snoozefest, Ripple’s enterprise blockchain traction gives it something most IPO candidates lack: real-world use cases. The irony? The same institutions that fought XRP might soon be underwriting its victory lap.

The Punchline

Nothing boosts a crypto project’s credibility like the SEC’s seal of disapproval—followed by a nine-figure IPO. Poetic justice tastes better when served with a side of institutional FOMO.

Ripple’s Fast-Rising Private Valuation

His comments dropped just days after Ripple opened a $700 million tender offer that prices private shares at $175—a 135 percent premium to recent secondary trading on Hyve and nearly triple the $65 tender executed two summers ago.

The latest price implies an equity valuation of roughly $25 billion for the 141 million shares outstanding. January’s buy-back had cleared at $125, underscoring how quickly insiders are marking the company higher. Internal deal documents circulated with the offer show $3.7 billion in cash, zero debt, and 41 billion XRP on the balance sheet—assets worth about $94 billion at spot or $47 billion using a fifty-percent haircut.

For now, though, management insists liquidity events are simply housekeeping. “IPO is not a priority,” CEO Brad Garlinghouse told shareholders in the tender-offer email that accompanied the latest buy-back.

However, regulatory overhang could be the main gating factor. In March the US Securities and Exchange Commission withdrew its appeal of Judge Analisa Torres’s 2023 ruling that programmatic XRP sales are not securities, a MOVE Garlinghouse hailed as a “long-overdue surrender.”

The agency and Ripple then negotiated a framework to dissolve the remaining injunction and split a previously imposed $125 million penalty, with $75 million returning to Ripple’s treasury and $50 million going to the SEC; that joint motion was filed on June 13 and awaits Torres’s sign-off. An earlier $50 million proposal was bounced in May for procedural defects, but the latest submission is widely expected to close the book on the five-year litigation.

Deaton’s $100 billion figure rests on treating Ripple’s XRP escrow as a de-facto asset base and assuming public investors will capitalize it at—or even above—spot value. That approach departs from how Wall Street valued Circle, whose June 4 New York Stock Exchange debut raised $1.1 billion at a $6.9 billion equity valuation even though roughly $62 billion in USDC circulates on-chain.

Skeptics point out that Circle’s tokens are liabilities, not residual assets, and that public-market investors have historically resisted paying dollar-for-dollar for native coins held by an issuer. Nevertheless, even excluding the escrow entirely, Ripple’s cash, securities and operating income already underpin a double-digit billion valuation that could expand sharply if XRP remains above $2.15.

Could Ripple Top Coinbase’s Record?

If Ripple were to float at a fully-diluted $100 billion, it WOULD eclipse Coinbase’s $86 billion landmark direct listing in April 2021 and set a new high-water mark for a crypto-native equity listing. Deaton’s thesis thus frames a potential record-breaker at the intersection of two forces: a legal détente that removes the core regulatory discount and a still-expanding XRP treasury whose mark-to-market value increasingly dwarfs Ripple’s current private-share price.

Judge Torres’s decision on the June 13 motion is the next catalyst. If she signs off, Ripple will emerge from the SEC saga with both a leaner penalty and a courtroom vindication it can take on the roadshow circuit.

Garlinghouse has repeatedly said the company is “not in a rush,” but the tender-offer terms expire July 9, and investors will parse any subsequent corporate filings or NASDAQ Private Market communications for hints of a registration statement.

At press time, XRP traded at $2.168.