Ripple and XRP are Ready

As I write this there is news that the Senate has just voted to re-open the US Government which is probably why XRP is up 10% today. Expect the first XRP Spot ETF to launch this week on Thursday 13th November. My birthday!

In other news, the president of NASDAQ was interviewed by the president of Ripple, Monica Long, at Swell and in the interview she confirmed the stock market was going the be the first place DLT was going to be implemented providing T+1 settlement of stocks. When you hear the term DLT which stands for Distributed Ledger Technology think XRP ledger (the term used for the XRP blockchain). This was confirmed by the DTCC - another acronym which stands for The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, a U.S. based financial market infrastructure company that provides clearing, settlement, and trade reporting services for financial market participants. This is a big deal as $6 trillion of stocks are traded on a daily basis and if that all goes through the XRPL then the XRP price will explode.

Also at Swell, Ripple announced a partnership with Mastercard to use their stablecoin RLUSD for settlement. Mastercard have long be known to be a partner of Ripple’s and potentially one of the 1700 companies who hold an NDA with Ripple.

I listened to a short podcast at the weekend of Jake Claver interviewing the President of Uphold who announced that you will be able to get 4% rewards in XRP on all purchases using their debit card. Also, Uphold will be launching a credit card in Q1 2026 where you can get a line of credit by using your assets as collateral. The interest rate on the credit card wasn’t disclosed but they did say it was going to be much lower than most credit cards on the market today. I really like Uphold as they are more than just a crypto exchange as they sell stocks and commodities as well. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Ripple bought Uphold as they already are close partners with Uphold operating Ripple’s On Demand Liquidity service.

As I’ve mentioned a few times in recents letters Ripple have acquired six businesses in the past couple of years: Metaco, Standard Custody, Hidden Road, Rail, GTreasury and Paliside. Here is an infographic which maps out the infrastructure being built by Ripple and the services Ripple can now offer. Ripple and XRP is ready to serve the financial institutions and institutions is where the big money is. And it is no coincidence that all the major financial institutions were at the Ripple Swell conference last week.

The below link takes you to a short video from Rob Cunningham on X explaining in simple terms what Ripple and XRP is and why it’s changing the world of finance.

Ripple are a brilliant company from Silicon Valley who model the principles of transparency and openess while disrupting a sector that has profited enormously from the friction it creates. “What a time to be alive”…. “It’s happening”. Some of the quotes from Brad Garlinghouse’s brilliant speech at the end of the Ripple Swell conference last week [start from 6min 24 seconds].