Ripple’s Secret Banking Play: $4B in Acquisitions, OCC Charter, and a Feb 26 ETF Deadline

Story Highlights

• Ripple’s $4 billion acquisition spree assembled a complete banking infrastructure stack in 2025.

• The OCC granted Ripple a national trust bank charter, giving it direct access to US banking rails.

• The SEC faces a February 26 deadline on T. Rowe Price’s active crypto ETF listing $XRP as a core asset.

Ripple is no longer just a payments company. Through a series of aggressive acquisitions in 2025 totaling roughly $4 billion, the company has assembled a full-stack banking infrastructure that positions it as what crypto analysts are now calling “the banker’s bank.”

The argument, laid out by NCashOfficial, is that traditional banks lack the time and expertise to build blockchain infrastructure from scratch. Ripple spent over a decade doing exactly that, and now it’s packaging the finished product for them.

Ripple’s $4 Billion Acquisition Stack

The buying spree started with Hidden Road for $1.25 billion, a prime brokerage clearing roughly $3 trillion annually. That was rebranded as Ripple Prime. Rail came next at $200 million, adding stablecoin payment rails. GTreasury followed at $1 billion, cracking open the corporate treasury market. Palisade rounded it out with institutional custody and wallet technology.

In December 2025, the OCC granted Ripple conditional approval for a national trust bank charter, giving the company direct access to US banking rails.

Brad Garlinghouse has been deliberate about how he frames this.

“Banks are our customers. If we want these technologies to have the biggest impact on the largest number of people, banks are the touch point,” he said.

Asked directly if Ripple would buy a bank, he kept it short: “They’re our customers.”

$XRP Supply Squeeze Builds Ahead of Feb 26 ETF Deadline

Separately, Cheeky Crypto highlighted that the SEC faces a February 26 deadline on T. Rowe Price’s active crypto ETF, which lists $XRP as a core eligible asset. T. Rowe Price manages $1.8 trillion in assets.

“We believe that blockchain technology and digital assets will play an important role in the future of the financial services industry,” the firm stated in its filing.

US spot $XRP ETFs already hold over $1 billion in net asset value, representing more than 1% of circulating supply. Since January, 42 new wallets holding over 1 million $XRP each have appeared on-chain.

Ripple’s 2026 roadmap includes native lending and zero-knowledge proofs on the $XRP Ledger. But analysts also flag a key risk: enterprise adoption of Ripple’s infrastructure “may not immediately translate into proportional demand for the $XRP token itself, creating a lag in price discovery.”

$XRP is trading at $1.44 with a market cap of roughly $87 billion.

This Might Interest You: Why Is $XRP Price Outperforming Bitcoin After the 2026 Crypto Crash?

Source