- CEO Brad Garlinghouse and the company’s updated roadmap have completely demolished all the FUD, as they emphasized XRP’s central role in Ripple’s infrastructure.
Ripple has been making significant strides in bridging onchain and traditional finance. After its four mega-mergers in 2025, the company is finally tying up its earlier acquisitions and partnerships to position itself at the forefront of the next evolution of the global financial sector, expanding beyond cross-border payments into a unified platform for digital asset custody, security, capital optimization, and more.
Ripple’s Rise as a Top-Tier Unicorn
The company’s rapid growth in 2026 has elevated it to the top tier of global unicorns, with its valuation rising to $50 million. The latest CB Insights data shows that it trails only online retailer SHEIN in the rankings and has already overtaken Figure, Ramp, Canva, and Perplexity AI.
It’s not clear if the data factored in the XRP the company has locked in escrow. However, some analysts believe that its latest valuation already accounted for the locked assets.
Ripple Highlights Focus on XRP
Speaking of XRP, there’s a lingering question amid Ripple’s advance, especially with its recent updates mostly centering on the Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin — which is mostly minted on the Ethereum (ETH) chain — and not on the native token of the XRP Ledger (XRPL) itself. This has fueled FUD (Fear, Doubt, Uncertainty) that the institution may be steering its focus away from the asset it built and launched in 2012.
Recently, Ripple quashed the unfounded accusations with the release of its updated roadmap. The document highlighted that XRPL remains the core technology of the blockchain solutions provider. Since nothing can move on the Ledger without XRP, Ripple cannot simply ignore or abandon it.
The paper emphasized that XRP is still central to Ripple’s infrastructure. Besides its role in XRPL transactions, it will continue to serve as a settlement and auto-bridge asset across the company’s platforms, ranging from forex and stablecoin rails to tokenized collateral and decentralized finance (DeFi) lending markets.
Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, has recently responded to members of the crypto community, especially supporters of XRP, who breathed a sigh of relief with the company’s updated roadmap. Garlinghouse said he’s glad to see that the message is clearer: “XRP family has and always will be top of mind for Ripple.”
More Reasons Why Ripple Can’t Abandon XRP
As mentioned earlier, Ripple has mostly tied its valuation to its XRP holdings, including those in escrow. That’s in addition to the fact that most of its solutions are anchored to the token’s chain.
Even Ripple’s top executives, like Garlinghouse and co-founder Chris Larsen, have heavily invested in XRP. Thus, undermining the token would be like them shooting their own feet, unless they had a noble goal, like the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, who already seems to have fully turned over his Bitcoin (BTC) creation to the world.
