Ripple has embarked on a massive $2.45 billion acquisition strategy, purchasing four key financial firms to build a comprehensive financial services platform, with strong public backing from its long-time institutional partner, SBI Group.
The acquisitions include prime brokerage firm Hidden Road, treasury software company GTreasury, stablecoin payment platform Rail, and wallet custody provider Palisade. Together, these form the foundation of what insiders are calling "Ripple 1," a platform designed to offer institutional clients everything from custody and payments to treasury management within a single ecosystem.
SBI Group President Yoshitaka Kitao, a former Ripple board member and long-time partner, publicly reaffirmed his support for this strategy. He stated that Ripple is moving "a step beyond product building" toward creating a full-scale financial infrastructure. SBI Group's involvement is deep and operational; it runs validator nodes on the XRP Ledger and has integrated XRP into its services like SBI Remit and MoneyTap.
The native digital assets XRP and Ripple's stablecoin RLUSD are positioned at the core of this new ecosystem. RLUSD is now being utilized as collateral in prime brokerage operations, while XRP supports payment processing, custody, and treasury functions across the platform. This integration aims to create a consistent and efficient financial operating system.
The company clarified that its use of Amazon's Bedrock AI is limited to internal log analysis and does not involve any protocol-level changes to the XRP Ledger, dispelling rumors of a major technical shift in partnership with AWS.
