Wall Street’s Calculation: What Does $500 Million Buy in Ripple?

Original Title: "Wall Street's Calculation: What Does $500 Million Buy from Ripple?"

Original Author: Seed.eth, BitpushNews

In November 2025, Ripple Labs announced a new round of strategic financing totaling $500 million, pushing the company’s valuation up to $40 billion. This marks the first public fundraising for this crypto finance company in six years and is the largest capital injection since its Series C round in 2019.

More importantly, the capital factions behind this round are extraordinary: Wall Street giants Fortress Investment Group and Citadel Securities led the round, joined by well-known institutions such as Pantera Capital, Galaxy Digital, Brevan Howard, and Marshall Wace.

For those familiar with Ripple, this could be considered a "comeback"—is this really the same Ripple that was once mired in an SEC lawsuit and even regarded as a "zombie company"?

From "Storytelling Master" to "Compliance Disaster Zone"

Founded in 2012, Ripple is one of the oldest projects in the crypto space. Its core technology is the XRP Ledger, a decentralized ledger designed specifically for cross-border payments. Ripple has developed payment and settlement systems based on this, and its token XRP was wildly popular worldwide during 2017-2018, ranking among the top three by market cap, second only to Bitcoin and Ethereum.

However, as the token price plummeted and the reality of "inflated" partnerships surfaced, Ripple’s narrative of "bank-grade cooperation" began to collapse.

During this period, Forbes published an article directly pointing out that Ripple’s core business model might be a "pump and dump" scheme: Ripple used its massive XRP holdings to buy partnerships, creating a false sense of prosperity, and used ambiguous language to evade regulation. The ultimate goal was not to truly promote its technology, but to boost the value of its freely obtained tokens through marketing and hype, allowing insiders to cash out for profit.

In December 2020, regulatory hammer fell.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Ripple for "unregistered securities sales," accusing it of illegally raising over $1.3 billion through XRP.

This was the most significant regulatory battle in the crypto industry.

The chain reaction triggered by the lawsuit was devastating: mainstream exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken quickly delisted XRP; long-term partner MoneyGram terminated cooperation; XRP’s price plummeted over 60% within the following month. Ripple not only suffered business losses but was also thoroughly blacklisted for compliance.

Strategic Transformation

This years-long tug-of-war cost Ripple nearly $200 million in legal fees, but it also won crucial breathing room and some favorable court rulings, buying valuable time for strategic transformation.

In 2024, Ripple officially launched RLUSD, a dollar-pegged stablecoin, focusing on compliance and targeting payment and settlement for financial institutions. Unlike USDT and USDC, RLUSD is not designed as an "exchange stablecoin" but aims to enter traditional credit card and cross-border clearing systems.

In 2025, Ripple announced partnerships with Mastercard, WebBank, Gemini, and others to use RLUSD for real-time credit card settlements, making it the world’s first on-chain stablecoin to enter card network systems.

This not only opens the B2B channel for stablecoin applications but also paves the way for Ripple’s integration with the real financial world.

To build a complete on-chain financial capability, Ripple carried out a series of targeted acquisitions between 2023 and 2025:

· Acquired Metaco: Gained institutional-grade digital asset custody technology, laying the foundation for serving large financial institutions.

· Acquired Rail: Obtained stablecoin issuance and management systems, accelerating the launch of RLUSD.

· Acquired Hidden Road: Filled the final gap in institutional credit networks and cross-border clearing capabilities.

Through these acquisitions, Ripple’s system capabilities have expanded from single cross-border payments to a full-stack financial infrastructure of "stablecoin issuance + institutional custody + cross-chain clearing."

The Truth Behind the $40 Billion Valuation

On the surface, Ripple’s transformation path is getting broader and broader.

But seasoned players in the capital markets see a different picture.

To understand the real logic behind this financing, one must see Ripple’s essence: a massive "digital asset treasury."

At XRP’s genesis, 80 billion out of 100 billion tokens were entrusted to Ripple. To date, the company still holds 34.76 billion, with a nominal value of over $80 billion at current prices—twice its financing valuation.

According to several venture capitalists, the $500 million deal is closely related to the purchase of XRP held by Ripple, and was likely bought at a price far below the spot price.

From an investment perspective, investors are essentially buying an asset at 0.5 times mNAV (market value to net asset value ratio). Even if a 50% liquidity discount is applied to the XRP holdings, the value of these assets still matches the company’s valuation.

A person familiar with the matter told Unchained: "Even if they can’t successfully build the business themselves, they can just buy another company outright."

A venture capitalist commented: "This company has no value except for its XRP holdings. No one uses their technology, and there’s no interest on the network/blockchain."

Another community member remarked: "Ripple’s equity itself may not be worth much, certainly not $40 billion."

A participant revealed the real logic: "The payments track is too hot right now, and investors need to bet on multiple horses in the race."

Ripple is just one of them—a horse that may be technically mediocre, but has extremely abundant fodder (XRP reserves).

And for Ripple, this is a win-win situation:

· Solidifying valuation: "Officially" setting the $40 billion valuation in the private market, providing a pricing benchmark for early investors to exit.

· Avoiding selling pressure: Using financing cash for acquisitions, thus avoiding market shocks from selling XRP.

Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen’s personal wealth has also soared to about $15 billion.

From this perspective, Ripple’s story becomes the most classic of financial tales: about assets, about valuation, about liquidity management.

From the defendant’s seat at the SEC to the meeting rooms of Wall Street, Ripple’s journey mirrors the crypto industry’s shift from idealism to realism. If the old Ripple was the pinnacle of "narrative economics," then today’s Ripple shows how, when the tide goes out, project teams can achieve a "soft landing" by relying on the most fundamental capital strength.