Wall Street’s Ripple Bet: How XRP is Becoming the Institutional Darling of Crypto

Big money is placing its chips on Ripple's XRP—and the implications could reshape crypto markets. Here's why institutions are suddenly bullish.

The Backroom Deals You Didn't See Coming

While retail traders chase memecoins, Goldman Sachs and friends quietly built XRP positions through OTC desks. The token now handles more institutional volume than some mid-cap stocks.

Regulatory Arbitrage Plays Out

XRP's partial legal clarity gives banks just enough cover to play in grey markets—because nothing excites finance like exploiting loopholes.

Liquidity Beats Technology (Again)

Forget the 'decentralization' sermons. What matters? XRP's 3-second settlements beat SWIFT, and Wall Street will always choose speed over ideology.

The real question: When the suits adopt a crypto, does it still count as rebellion—or just another profit center?

Ripple attracts Wall Street

The most striking detail in Ripple’s funding round wasn’t the 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 symbolic bets.

Their participation signals a distinct shift. Ripple, once viewed as a crypto company fighting for legitimacy, is being valued as an infrastructure provider and a systems-level player building components that resemble parts of the traditional securities stack.

Ripple’s recent acquisitions spree helps explain the appeal. The company has spent $1.25 billion acquiring Hidden Road, a global prime broker that clears more than $3 trillion annually across FX and digital assets.

The deal, now rebranded as Ripple Prime, instantly positioned Ripple as the first crypto-native firm 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 across 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 businesses give Ripple a holistic product ecosystem that mirrors the workflow of institutional clients: custody → treasury → settlement → trading → financing. It is a structure that resembles a blockchain-powered State Street or BNY Mellon increasingly.

For deep-pocketed macro funds seeking 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 regulatory footholds.

XRPL finds a second life

Ripple’s pivot toward institutional infrastructure is reshaping how XRP and the XRP Ledger (XRPL) are being perceived across the financial sector.

Once overshadowed by newer smart-contract platforms, XRPL is regaining relevance because its Core attributes, including deterministic finality, consistent throughput, and a decade of uninterrupted uptime, align closely with what banks and payment networks require from a settlement system.

That alignment has tightened further with the introduction of RLUSD, Ripple’s fully reserved, NYDFS-regulated stablecoin.

Since its launch in late 2024, RLUSD has grown to exceed $1 billion in circulation, with XRPL serving as its primary settlement ledger.

As a result, the combination is changing how institutional players view Ripple’s ecosystem. In this community, XRPL provides reliability, RLUSD delivers a unit of account, and XRP supplies the native liquidity and consensus stability that keep the system operational.

Indeed, this architecture marks a substantive shift in XRP’s role. Rather than acting as a standalone speculative asset, XRP now sits deeper inside Ripple’s institutional stack as a coordination mechanism that ensures throughput and predictable transaction costs.

So, 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 amplifying it.

This shift is significantly pronounced through Ripple’s new partnership with Mastercard, WebBank, and Gemini. The firms 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 embeds XRP deeper inside the system as the asset securing ledger consensus and liquidity.

Monica Long, President of Ripple, said:

“This partnership is a meaningful step toward showcasing how regulated digital assets like RLUSD can enhance settlement, paving the way for other card programs to adopt stablecoins for faster, compliant payments. The XRPL will serve as the backbone for these and other institutional use cases that are transforming how financial services operate.”

XRP’s redefined identity

All of these show that Ripple’s transformation is less a pivot than an architectural overhaul. It has moved from advocating blockchain payments to constructing 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 entering the picture quietly but decisively. Ripple offers exposure to a regulated stablecoin, institutional settlement flows, and a ledger with a credible technical history.

XRP, in this reframed environment, is valued not for 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 utility, 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 assembled all point toward a sector where crypto and traditional finance are increasingly overlapping.

In that landscape, XRP is no longer a relic of early blockchain experiments. It becomes an infrastructure that WOULD be functional and central to the system Ripple is building.