Ripple Launches $750M Buyback at $50B Valuation as XRP ETFs Hold Firm
Ripple has launched a share buyback program worth up to $750 million, setting its private valuation at $50 billion even as XRP trades at $1.38, down more than 53% over the past six months. The tender offer runs through April and is available to both institutional investors and employees holding privately-held shares. Bloomberg first reported the move on Wednesday, citing a source with direct knowledge of the transaction.
A Company Betting on Itself in a Bear Market
Let that sink in for a moment. Crypto markets are bleeding. XRP has shed more than half its value since its July 2025 peak of $3.66. Bitcoin is down 30% to 40% over the same window. And Ripple just marked itself up 25% from the $40 billion valuation it carried after its November 2025 funding round, when Fortress Investment Group, Citadel Securities, Pantera Capital, and others put in $500 million.
That is either supreme confidence or supreme narrative management. Possibly both. Corporate buybacks are standard tools for signaling conviction, and Ripple knows how to work a story. But the underlying operational data does give the valuation some grounding. The company has processed more than $100 billion in transaction volume across its payments infrastructure. Its RLUSD stablecoin crossed $1 billion in market capitalization this week. It spent $1.25 billion acquiring prime brokerage firm Hidden Road and another $1 billion on treasury management provider GTreasury. It recently announced plans to acquire a local Australian payments firm to pursue a financial services license there, and it received conditional approval from the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national trust bank charter in December.
Ripple is not just holding XRP and waiting. It is building a regulated financial services company around the token’s infrastructure. That matters for how you read the valuation, even if the $750 million buyback also conveniently puts a premium number into the public conversation at a moment when XRP’s price is struggling. One complicating data point: Forge Global, which tracks private share trading, showed Ripple’s privately-traded shares had actually declined more than 9% through Wednesday. So the buyback valuation and the secondary market price are not exactly aligned. That tension deserves acknowledgment.
ETF Resilience Is Real, But Context Matters
Spot XRP ETFs launched in mid-November 2025. Canary Capital’s XRPC broke the 2025 trading volume record on day one. The first $1 billion in cumulative net inflows arrived within a month. Those were headline numbers, and the market celebrated them accordingly.
Then price started falling. XRP traded around $2.50 when XRPC went live. It hit a 15-month low of $1.11 on February 6. That is a 45% decline across the ETF’s lifespan so far. Despite that, cumulative inflows across the five spot XRP ETFs have held above $1.4 billion according to Bloomberg’s James Seyffart, with SoSoValue’s tally sitting at $1.21 billion. The discrepancy between those two figures is worth watching but does not change the broader picture.
The picture is this: the fast money has mostly left. March is shaping up as the first red month for the ETFs, with net outflows of around $26 million so far. January brought just $15.59 million in inflows after the November and December rush. The retail momentum trade has cooled. What remains is a more patient, structurally-oriented holder base, with Goldman Sachs now carrying the largest disclosed institutional position among US spot XRP ETF holders. As Goldman’s position atop the institutional ETF rankings suggests, the buyers still in the trade are not trend-chasers. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse flagged the ETFs’ “remarkable staying power” given the conditions. That is fair. It is also a very convenient thing to say when your company is simultaneously trying to put a $50 billion number in front of the market.
What the On-Chain Data Actually Shows
Separate from the corporate narrative, the market structure has shifted in ways that are harder to spin. XRP open interest has collapsed roughly 78% from its July 2025 peak of $10.94 billion to around $2.40 billion currently, according to CoinGlass data. The leverage has been wrung out. Long liquidations dominated during the drawdown. Funding rates turned defensive. That cleanup is genuinely useful for the asset’s next move because forced selling pressure from leveraged positions diminishes alongside the open interest.
Meanwhile, large holders accumulated approximately 110 million XRP tokens during March alone, worth around $152 million at current prices. Exchange reserves dropped to their lowest level since May 2021. Binance recorded outflows of 530 million XRP on February 6 and another 278 million on February 9. Exchange outflows do not always signal accumulation in isolation, but the scale and the timing, during maximum fear, suggest durable holders rather than sellers repositioning.
The partnership story is more complicated. February brought Ripple integrations with Deutsche Bank, Aviva Investors, Société Générale’s SG-FORGE unit, Zand, and Figment. None of it moved the price. Why? Because most of those partnerships use Ripple’s enterprise messaging infrastructure, not XRP-denominated settlement. Network fees on the XRP Ledger run at 0.00001 XRP per transaction. The token’s utility as a settlement bridge through On-Demand Liquidity matters, but institutional announcements that skip that layer have limited direct impact on XRP supply dynamics.
The Narrative Gap
Here is the honest read: Ripple the company is executing well by almost any corporate metric. Ripple the narrative machine is also working hard, timing a premium valuation story during a period of token weakness. Those two things can both be true simultaneously. The buyback is real. The $50 billion figure is real. Whether it translates to XRP price recovery depends on whether the operational story eventually demands XRP-denominated settlement at scale, and whether broader macro conditions stop punishing risk assets.
The market does not pay for what a company deserves. It pays for what participants believe, collectively, at a given moment. Right now, belief is cheap and patience is the actual trade. The buyers staying in at $1.38 already know that.
