The winner behind Ripple's 100 billion market value: selling coins to make a living, payment, ETF and political trends

Author: Nancy, PANews

Decentralization is regarded as the core creed of the crypto world, but the story of the old public chain Ripple is full of drama and contrast. Since its birth, Ripple has been controversial for its highly concentrated token distribution model and has been criticized for deviating from the spirit of crypto. Even its founder admitted that the company "makes a living by selling coins." At the same time, this crypto project with a market value of $100 billion was accused of lack of technological innovation and mediocre revenue performance. Forbes even mercilessly labeled Ripple as a "zombie enterprise".

Despite this, the market and reality tell another story. Ripple has won the favor of financial institutions, and its market value has often been in full swing, even comparable to traditional giants. Recently, multiple factors such as rising ETF expectations, support from US political forces, promotion of payment business, and vigorous layout of stablecoins have once again pushed Ripple into the spotlight.

With payment as the core, Ripple expands its multi-line business

Ripple continues to promote business expansion this year. As we all know, cross-border payment and remittance are Ripple's core business, and this year it continues to extend its tentacles around the world. For example, Ripple expands its business territory in Africa through cooperation with Chipper Cash, Ripple joins forces with Unicâmbio, the oldest currency exchange agency in Portugal to promote instant payments between Brazil and Portugal, and SBI Xinsheng Bank uses Ripple's DLT for international remittances.

In order to ensure the continuous legal and compliant operation of the business, Ripple vigorously promotes the application of global licenses. As of April 2025, Ripple has obtained more than 55 remittance licenses (MTLs) worldwide, covering 33 states in the United States and Dubai and other places. In recent months alone, Ripple has successively obtained remittance licenses in New York and Texas, and has become the first blockchain payment provider to obtain a payment license from the Dubai Financial Services Authority, providing regulated cryptocurrency payment services in the UAE.

Not only that, Ripple is further expanding its influence in the payment field with the stablecoin RLUSD. Since its launch in December, RLUSD's market value has climbed to more than $290 million. This year, Ripple accelerates the expansion of RLUSD application scenarios. For example, Ripple cooperated with Chainlink to improve the practicality of RLUSD in the DeFi field; Ripple reached a cooperation with Revolut and Zero Hash to expand the market coverage of RLUSD; Recently, while RLUSD launched the exchange Kraken, it was also integrated into its payment solutions Ripple Payments for its cross-border payment processes for customers such as BKK Forex and iSend. In the future, Ripple plans to open up RLUSD usage permissions to more payment platforms.

Recently, Ripple announced that it had spent $1.25 billion to acquire Hidden Road, a crypto-friendly main broker, which is one of the largest acquisitions in the cryptocurrency industry to date. As a major brokerage and credit network, Hidden Road has more than 300 institutional clients, with more than $10 billion cleared through traditional payment channels and more than 50 million transactions processed. After the acquisition is completed, Hidden Road will integrate RLUSD as collateral for its main brokerage products while migrating its post-trade activity to the XRPLedger blockchain. This will not only bring more liquidity and application scenarios to RLUSD, but will also help Ripple to further make efforts in the real-world asset (RWA) track.

In addition, Ripple is also expanding its crypto hosting and wallet business. In mid-March this year, Ripple Labs submitted a trademark application for "Ripple Custody". According to the application documents, the trademark covers financial services, including the storage and management of crypto assets, to meet financial management needs. The trademark application follows Ripple's launch of custody services in October 2024, which may indicate that the company is seeking to expand its revenue streams beyond payment settlement. The trademark application also mentioned "downloadable cryptocurrency, fiat currency, virtual currency and digital currency custody, transmission and storage software", which may mean that Ripple is considering launching an official crypto wallet. If the product is implemented, new revenue growth points can be created through transaction fees.

It is worth noting that Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse also revealed not long ago that Ripple plans to enter the financial fields of payments, real estate and securities transactions in the future.

SEC withdraws lawsuit and wins four-year **lawsuit, "close" with

Trump**

After Trump came to power, the regulatory environment of the US crypto industry has clearly turned to loosening, and Ripple, which has experienced several years of twists and turns, has also ushered in a "major victory." In March this year, Ripple announced that the US SEC officially revoked the four-year lawsuit against the company, and the two parties reached a preliminary settlement agreement. The SEC agreed to refund $75 million of the $125 million fine ruled by the court last year, leaving only $50 million to close the case. In exchange, Ripple will withdraw its cross appeal.

"This moment has finally arrived, a time we have been waiting for. The SEC will give up the appeal, which is a complete victory for Ripple, and from any perspective, it is a victory for the crypto industry. The future is bright. Let's build it together." Garlinghouse announced at the time.

Before this, Ripple's expansion in the US market was severely constrained due to the protracted "security dispute" with the US SEC. Garlinghouse revealed in an exclusive interview with Fox Business that the SEC lawsuit forced Ripple to turn 95% of its customer base overseas markets. To cope with this dilemma, Ripple actively engaged in U.S. political lobbying and invested huge sums of money in the Super Political Action Commission Fairshake during the 2024 U.S. election, becoming one of the most generous large-scale corporate donors in the crypto industry.

Ripple's "close relationship" with Trump also injects imagination space into his expansion in the United States. In early January this year, Garlinghouse posted a photo of her dinner with Trump and others on X, which attracted widespread attention. Soon after, in the early stages of the Trump MEME currency TRUMP, Ripple and Galaxy Digital also provided $160 million emergency loans to crypto payment company MoonPay to ensure that its high transaction needs in the early stages of its launch were met. This support is believed to have played an important role in the rapid growth of TRUMP tokens in the early stage.

In mid-February, Trump shared an article about XRP on Truth Social, citing Garlinghouse's statement that the company's business transactions and recruitment of personnel in the United States have increased significantly since Trump won the election in November last year. This move quickly ignited market sentiment, and XRP trading volume soared. Last month, Trump further announced the inclusion of cryptocurrencies such as XRP into the US strategic reserves, a policy announcement that aroused a warm response in the market.

**XRP ETF global layout accelerates, CEO says it may launch in the second

half of the year**

While the U.S. regulatory environment for cryptocurrencies is rapidly evolving, the ETF application boom has also brought significant impetus to Ripple.

Since the beginning of this year, ETF products around XRP have been progressing frequently. For example, asset management firm Purpose Investments submitted a preliminary prospectus for the first Ripple ETF to Canadian securities regulators; in February this year, Brazil approved the world's first spot XRP ETF, which will be listed on the Brazilian B3 exchange; in March, Hashdex submitted an amendment to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), planning to expand its ETF products to cryptocurrencies such as XRP; not long ago, Teucrium Investment Advisors launched the U.S. first XRP-pegged leveraged ETF in the U.S., aiming to provide double daily returns on XRP tokens.

At the same time, many well-known institutions such as Bitwise, Grayscale, WisdomTree and Franklin Templeton have also submitted applications for spot XRP ETFs, but these applications have not yet been approved by the SEC. But Nate Geraci, president of The ETF Store, believes that the end of Ripple's lawsuit with the SEC means that the approval of the spot XRP ETF is "apparently only a matter of time". Bloomberg analyst James Seyffart also held a similar view, predicting that the XRP ETF may be launched in the next few months and is likely to be the first to see ETF products based on XRP futures.

Garlinghouse revealed in an interview with Bloomberg TV that the XRP ETF may be launched in the second half of 2025, and there are currently about 11 XRP ETF issuance application documents for different companies awaiting approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission. "In addition, he also revealed that Ripple Labs' IPO is not impossible.

The currency price hits a record high for many years, and **the token

model has caused controversy**

Driven by multiple positive factors, XRP prices have seen a significant boost. According to CoinGecko data, XRP has risen by 70.62% to $3.3 since the beginning of this year, once hitting a new high since January 2018.

Garlinghouse even bluntly stated that with the rise in XRP prices and the increase in demand for Ripple blockchain solutions, the company's original valuation of $11 billion has become "seriously outdated".

Standard Chartered Bank said in a recent report that XRP has risen sixfold within six months after Trump was elected. This increase is sustainable, partly due to changes in the SEC leadership, and also because XRP is uniquely at the heart of one of the most growth-potential applications of digital assets—cross-border and cross-currency payments. Meanwhile, XRP Ledger (XRPL) is highly consistent with the main use cases of stablecoins (such as Tether), namely, financial transactions completed by traditional financial (TradFi) institutions are supported through blockchain technology. It is predicted that stablecoin trading volume will increase tenfold in the next four years. Ripple also plans to expand XRPL into the tokenization space, and these positive factors suggest that XRP should keep pace with its biggest competitor Bitcoin. The agency expects XRP to rise to $12.5 before President Trump leaves office. But Standard Chartered also supports XRPL with two disadvantages: a small number of developers and a limited ability to capture value.

However, Ripple's token model has also caused controversy. For example, Pierre Rochard, vice president of research at Riot Platforms, once warned that investors "did not invest in Ripple, but just gain tokens created out of thin air. XRP is not a securities because Ripple does not actually owe you 'utility' or anything else." In response, Ripple's chief technology officer David "Joel Katz" Schwartz responded, "Ripple can, will and should focus on its own interests. Investors should not expect Ripple to benefit investors in ways that harm the interests of the company and its shareholders." This statement implies that Ripple has the right to sell XRP tokens to raise operating funds, which has caused investors' concerns. In fact, Garlinghouse also admitted, “If we don’t sell our XRP assets, we will not be profitable or generate positive cash flow.”

Public information shows that the total issuance of XRP is 100 billion, of which 20 billion are owned by three creators Chris Larsen, Jed McCaleb and Arthur Britto, and the remaining 80 billion are allocated to Ripple Labs.

However, in order to alleviate market concerns about the supply of XRP, Ripple has locked 55 billion XRPs (55% of the total) in XRP Ledger-based custodial accounts since 2017. These custodial accounts are automatically unlocked by smart contracts and will automatically unlock 1 billion XRPs per month, and will be adjusted to 450 million monthly after 2020. However, each unlocked token is not all entered the market for circulation. Ripple usually only uses partial unlocked tokens (such as 20%-25% for market sales), and the remaining part is relocked to custody and extended to release in the future months.

It should be noted that the founders of Ripple still hold a large amount of XRP. According to crypto detective ZachXBT in March, the XRP address activated by Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen still holds more than 2.7 billion XRP (about $7.18 billion). These Larsen-related addresses transferred more than $109 million worth of XRP to the exchange in January 2025.