Ripple has been on a buying spree, spending more than $2.4 billion billion to purchase at least four companies in 2025.

Don’t expect the same next year, the company’s CEO said on Wednesday at the company’s annual Swell conference in New York.

“We’ll probably slow down the acquisition binge in 2026 which makes our corporate developer team very happy,” Brad Garlinghouse quipped during an onstage Q&A.

On Monday, Ripple announced the acquisition of Palisade, a crypto custody company. Ripple did not disclose the cost of that purchase, and a spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment on Thursday.

Earlier this year, the company bought Hidden Road, a global prime broker, for $1.25 billion. The acquisition closed in October, and the company has since been rebranded to Ripple Prime.

In October, it also spent $1 billion on GTreasury, a firm that provides treasury services for Fortune 500 companies.

And in August, Ripple announced the acquisition of Rail, a stablecoin payments company, for $200 million.

An eye on TradFi

“Ripple aspires, and I think we are clearly in the lead, to be the blockchain infrastructure company — period,” Garlinghouse said on Wednesday. “For the enterprise, for financial institutions.”

Mergers and acquisitions have boomed in the crypto industry this year. Over 200 such deals worth about $20 billion had been announced by September, Karl-Martin Ahrend, co-founder of crypto M&A firm Areta, told DL News that month. He expected those figures to grow to $30 billion across 400 deals in 2025.

But Ripple has taken a unique approach, the CEO said.

“We have, unlike other crypto companies, leaned into buying what I could call traditional finance assets,” Garlinghouse said.

“Hidden Road, the vast majority of business is not digital. Certainly GTreasury, that’s true, and we think that is the bridge between traditional finance and [what] we call decentralised finance.”

Indeed, owning a prime broker signals that crypto is muscling into the same space as traditional financial firms. Prime brokers are the gatekeepers of professional trading. They determine who gets access to leverage, which assets qualify as collateral, and how risk is managed.

The GTreasury acquisition, meanwhile, allows Ripple to better integrate its RLUSD ($1.00) stablecoin into company money management.

Speaking at the Swell conference on Tuesday, GTreasury CEO Renaat Ver Eecke said he was eager to educate clients on the benefits of using stablecoins in treasury management.

“What if we could reduce settlement times to minutes?” Ver Eecke said, recalling conversations with clients. “They will immediately come to me and say, ‘Oh my gosh, I have $50 million trapped in two legal entities in Europe that hoard this cash because they’re worried about five, six, seven day settlements.’”

No exchange

One thing that isn’t on Ripple’s wishlist? A crypto exchange.

“We looked at that a long time ago. We are very happy investors in a number of different crypto exchanges,” Garlinghouse said.

“But that’s a very different business than one Ripple’s in. … I don’t see us entering the exchange market.”

Earlier in the conference on Wednesday, Garlinghouse interviewed White House crypto official Patrick Witt, and attributed the M&A boom to the crypto-friendly regulatory environment fostered by President Donald Trump.

“During the Biden administration, we couldn’t find any big crypto acquisitions,” the CEO said. “And in Q3 alone, this most recent Q3, we found 95 different crypto acquisitions.”

Ripple’s strategy received a vote of confidence from investors this week.

On Wednesday, the firm announced a $500 million strategic investment from affiliates of Fortress Investment Group, affiliates of Citadel Securities, Pantera Capital, Galaxy Digital, Brevan Howard, and Marshall Wace.

The raise values Ripple at $40 billion — a more than 263% increase from the firm’s previous valuation event. In January 2024, Ripple bought back $285 million worth of shares from early investors and employees at an $11.3 billion valuation, according to Reuters.

Amid a recent crypto downturn, Ripple’s XRP ($2.22) cryptocurrency has performed well compared to other major cryptocurrencies.

XRP has dropped 23%, to $2.23, over the past 30 days, while Ethereum, BNB ($948.38), and Solana have all fallen more than 28%.

Aleks Gilbert is DL News’ New York-based DeFi correspondent. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.