Ripple Labs has become one of the world’s largest crypto companies, but its management team is much more than that, CEO Brad Garlinghouse told CNBC. Over the past year, the company has ramped up its efforts to bridge the Web3 world with traditional finance, an industry long seen as Web3’s foil.
In an interview with CNBC’s “Crypto World” at the Ripple Swell 2025 conference in New York, Garlinghouse said his company aims to capitalize on the growing institutional adoption of digital assets to offer a wide range of traditional financial services built on blockchain infrastructure.
Blockchain is a distributed digital ledger that records transactions across a network of computers.
“I look forward to Ripple investing in the future and staying ahead of the market,” Garlinghouse said on Tuesday. “The assets we have been purchasing have been on the traditional finance side, so we are able to bring a crypto-enabled solution to the traditional finance world.”
Aiming to become a company specializing in finance
Ripple has been making nearly $4 billion in acquisitions in its bid to become a financial services powerhouse, and in 2025 alone, it acquired prime brokerage firm Hidden Road for nearly $1.3 billion in April and software company GT Treasury for more than $1 billion this fall. Last week, the company launched Ripple Prime, a brokerage firm that provides U.S.-based financial institutions with access to over-the-counter spot market trading of multiple tokens, raising $500 million in new funding and raising its market value to $40 billion.
Ripple’s efforts to deepen its push into traditional finance come as institutional demand for digital assets grows as the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission loosen digital asset regulations this year under President Donald Trump, a self-proclaimed crypto champion.
bank of america and citygroup Citi has begun actively considering stablecoins, recently announcing plans to launch a cryptocurrency storage service for customers in 2026. JP Morgan announced in June that it plans to introduce stablecoin-like “deposit tokens” to Coinbase’s public blockchain Base. Beyond dollar-pegged tokens, institutional investors have poured billions of dollars into spot Bitcoin ETFs since their U.S. debut in January 2024.
“The U.S. used to lean towards cryptocurrencies, now they lean towards it, and I think people are underestimating how big of a change that is,” Garlinghouse said of the potential impact on the overall crypto market.
institutional integration
In addition to building its own services, Garlinghouse said Ripple also aims to strike deals to lend its XRP ledger technology to large institutional crypto initiatives.
Such a partnership could be a boon for XRP, the native token of the XRP Ledger, a decentralized blockchain aimed at providing fast and low-cost transactions.
“The more solutions that can build utility and really scale that leverage XRP at their core, the more it will be uniquely beneficial to the XRP ecosystem,” Garlinghouse said.
XRP Although it remained flat for most of 2025, ether and Bitcoin They hit record highs of approximately $3,900 and $126,000, respectively.
But while high-profile partnerships could boost XRP’s price, transactions with traditional institutions are likely to remain difficult as efforts to create guardrails for U.S. crypto companies and holders stall, Garlinghouse said.
The cryptocurrency industry lobby previously expected that lawmakers would pass a comprehensive digital asset market structure bill, known as the Clarity Act, by the end of the year.
But efforts to establish legal guidelines for the industry have stalled as the U.S. government shutdown enters its sixth week.
“Until we get that (legal permission), it’s going to be difficult,” Garlinghouse said. “Banks want and need that clarity to get serious.”
