Ripple

Origins and early history

In 2011, engineers David Schwartz and Jed McCaleb began developing a financial infrastructure similar to bitcoin that would use substantially less energy and reduce transaction time. In September 2012, Chris Larsen and McCaleb co-founded NewCoin, which was renamed OpenCoin the following month.

On April 11, 2013, OpenCoin announced it had closed an angel round of funding with several venture capital firms. That same month, OpenCoin acquired SimpleHoney to help it popularize virtual currencies and make them easier for average users.

On September 26, 2013, OpenCoin officially changed its name to Ripple Labs, Inc. On October 6, 2015, the company was rebranded from Ripple Labs to Ripple.

Introduction of banking sector products and international expansion

In March 2018, a Japanese bank consortium led by SBI Ripple Asia, comprising 61 banks, launched "MoneyTap", a Ripple-powered mobile app to provide on-demand domestic payments in Japan. In May 2018, Spanish Banking group Santander released One Pay FX — the first mobile application for international payments powered by blockchain technology, that uses Ripple's xCurrent technology. XCurrent is not a blockchain or any form of distributed ledger. Ripple CTO David Schwartz described it as "bi-directional messaging" that can eventually plug into distributed ledgers. Following the creation of a Mumbai office, Ripple added multiple Indian customers in 2018, including leading banks such as Kotak Mahindra Bank, Axis Bank, and IndusInd, that announced that they started using Ripple's products. Ripple's CEO predicted that by end of 2018 "major banks" would be using Ripple tools that made use of the XRP cryptocurrency and that by end of 2019 "dozens" of banks would be using XRP. However, neither of those predictions came to pass in the specified time frame.

In May 2023, Ripple acquired Switzerland-based crypto custody firm Metaco for $250 million. In addition to expanding its potential customer base, the purchase also expanded the company's international presence during a time of increased scrutiny by the SEC towards U.S. cryptocurrency companies. In June 2023, Ripple received approval for a license from the central bank of Singapore to offer regulated digital payment token products and services.

In April 2024, Forbes referred to it as a "crypto zombie" noting the company was not making progress in disrupting SWIFT, in 2023 generated $583,000 in fees, and that the company has $24 billion worth of XRP tokens in escrow that it could sell over the following four years.

Ripple acquired four companies in late 2025. In August, the company acquired the stablecoin payment firm, Rail, for $200 million. Two months later, Ripple announced the acquisition of Hidden Road, a multi-asset prime broker, for $1.25 billion, and GTreasury, a global treasury management system, for $1 billion. The following month, Ripple announced the acquisition of Palisade, a digital asset custody firm, for an undisclosed sum. Between 2023 and 2025, Ripple contributed $4 billion to the cryptocurrency industry through acquisitions and business tradings. In January 2026, Ripple Treasury acquired Solvexia, a financial automation provider, for an undisclosed sum. Two months later, Ripple announced the acquisition of BC Payments Australia, a payments subsidiary of Banking Circle, also for an undisclosed sum.

Ripple Treasury (formerly GTreasury)

In October 2025, Ripple announced its acquisition of GTreasury, a Chicago-based treasury management system (TMS) company, for approximately US$1 billion. Founded in 1986, GTreasury developed software for liquidity management, cash forecasting, payments, multilateral netting and risk management, and reported serving more than 1,000 customers across 160 countries. By 2025, the business processed approximately US$12.5 trillion in payments annually. GTreasury had been majority-owned by Hg since 2023, with Mainsail Partners retaining a minority interest; both firms exited their investments in the Ripple transaction. Ripple announced its intent to combine GTreasury's treasury-management technology with its own digital-asset infrastructure. Later in January 2026, Ripple launched Ripple Treasury, integrating GTreasury's treasury-management software with Ripple's digital-asset infrastructure. The platform supports Ripple's stablecoin RLUSD and access to overnight repo markets through Ripple Prime, the prime-brokerage business formerly known as Hidden Road. Ripple Treasury also provides access to tokenized money-market funds, including BlackRock's BUIDL.

Ripple is a privately funded company. It has closed five rounds of funding, which included two rounds of angel funding, one round of seed funding, one Series A round, one Series B round and one Series C round.

Regulatory and legal matters

FinCEN enforcement action, BitLicense, and R3 litigation (2015–2020)

On May 5, 2015, Ripple received a US$700,000 civil penalty from the U.S. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) for "willful violation of the Bank Secrecy Act by acting as a money services business without registering with FinCEN". The company agreed to remedial steps to ensure future compliance, including an agreement to only transact XRP and "Ripple Trade" activity through registered money services businesses (MSB), among other agreements such as enhancing the Ripple Protocol.

On June 13, 2016, XRP II LLC, an affiliate of Ripple Labs, received a BitLicense from the New York State Department of Financial Services. It was the second BitLicense issued by the regulator.

In September 2017, blockchain startup R3 sued Ripple for specific performance of an option agreement in which Ripple agreed to sell up to five billion XRPs (the native cryptocurrency of Ripple protocol) for a price of $.0085. Ripple countersued, claiming that R3 reneged on contractual promises, and was merely acting on opportunism, after the cryptocurrency increased in value more than 30 times. In September 2018, Ripple and R3 reached an undisclosed settlement agreement.

A February 2020 article in Financial Times Alphaville reported that MoneyGram, the largest public user of Ripple's XRP based liquidity tools, had received a $50m investment prior to adopting the tools and also that the software was provided free of charge by Ripple and that MoneyGram was receiving an on-going subsidy for using XRP, amounting to $8.9m in Q4 2019. The same article indicated that Ripple was dependent on sales of XRP to remain profitable.

SEC litigation (2020–2025)

On December 22, 2020, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil lawsuit against Ripple and two of its executives in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that their offers and sales of XRP violated the registration provisions of the Securities Act of 1933. The SEC alleged that Ripple had raised more than $1.3 billion through unregistered offers and sales of XRP, that co-founder Chris Larsen and CEO Brad Garlinghouse had aided and abetted Ripple's violations, and that the executives' own XRP sales also violated the registration requirements. In April 2021, Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn granted a motion by Garlinghouse and Larsen to quash SEC requests for personal financial records beyond the XRP transaction records they had agreed to produce.

On July 13, 2023, Judge Analisa Torres issued a summary judgment granting each side's motion in part. The court distinguished XRP itself from the circumstances of its sale. It held that Ripple's institutional sales constituted unregistered offers and sales of investment contracts, but that its programmatic sales on digital asset exchanges did not satisfy the requirement that purchasers reasonably expect profits to be derived from the efforts of others. It also held that certain other distributions did not satisfy the investment-of-money requirement, and that Larsen's and Garlinghouse's own exchange-based sales did not constitute offers and sales of investment contracts. The court did not decide whether secondary-market sales of XRP constituted offers and sales of investment contracts because that issue was not before it. In October 2023, the SEC dismissed with prejudice its remaining claims that Garlinghouse and Larsen had aided and abetted Ripple's unlawful institutional sales.