Surprising Statements from Ripple (XRP) CEO Brad Garlinghouse: “In 2026…”

Ripple’s aggressive acquisitions, which continued throughout 2025, will slow down next year.

The company has spent over $2.4 billion in total acquiring at least four companies in 2025. But that pace will slow in 2026, CEO Brad Garlinghouse said at the annual Swell conference in New York.

“We’ll probably slow down this acquisition spree in 2026, which makes our corporate development team very happy,” Garlinghouse joked during the onstage interview.

Ripple announced the acquisition of cryptocurrency custody firm Palisade on Monday.

Earlier this year, Ripple acquired global brokerage firm Hidden Road for $1.25 billion. The company was renamed Ripple Prime after the deal closed in October.

The company also acquired GTreasury, a treasury management provider for Fortune 500 companies, for $1 billion in another major deal in October. In August, it acquired Rail, a stablecoin payments company, in a $200 million deal.

Garlinghouse summarized Ripple’s goal: “Ripple clearly wants to be the blockchain infrastructure company for enterprise and financial institutions, which I believe is the leading one, period.”

However, Garlinghouse noted that Ripple is taking a different path in the industry.

“Unlike other crypto companies, we’ve focused on acquiring traditional finance assets,” he said. “Most of Hidden Road’s business is non-digital. The same goes for GTreasury. We believe they bridge the gap between traditional and decentralized finance.”

The brokerage acquisition is seen as a sign that Ripple is entering the TradFi space more aggressively. Prime brokers are known as the gatekeepers of the professional trading world, dictating many critical decisions, from leverage access to collateral criteria.

According to the CEO, there’s one thing that’s not on Ripple’s radar: establishing a crypto exchange.

“We considered this a long time ago. We’re happy to have investors in many exchanges,” Garlinghouse said, “but this is a very different business from what Ripple is in. I don’t think we’ll be entering the stock market.”

*This is not investment advice.