Ripple is no longer just about moving money. He wants it to be the entire pipe.
The company shared a press release with CoinDesk on Wednesday outlining a major expansion of Ripple Payments that transforms the platform into a comprehensive infrastructure layer for the movement of fiat and stablecoin money.
Businesses can now collect, hold, exchange and pay in both traditional currencies and stablecoins through a single provider, rather than consolidating separate providers for custody, collections, conversion and settlement.
The new capabilities come from two recent acquisitions. Palisade, which manages custody and treasury automation, powers the managed custody layer that allows businesses to provision wallets at scale and move funds to operational accounts.
Rail, a virtual accounts and collections platform, enables businesses to accept fiat and stablecoin payments through named virtual accounts with automated conversion and settlement.
The result is that a fintech making cross-border payments no longer needs one provider for custody, another for FX, a third for stable liquidity, and a fourth for local payment rails. Ripple consolidates all of this onto a single platform with a single integration.
“For the global financial system to evolve, fintechs and financial institutions need infrastructure that treats digital assets with the same rigor as traditional finance,” Monica Long, president of Ripple, said in a prepared statement. “Ripple has built the model for blockchain-based enterprise solutions designed to operate globally for regulated finance.”
Meanwhile, Ripple said the platform has now processed over $100 billion in total volume. The milestone comes amid a broader backdrop of accelerated adoption of stablecoins in the financial system, with global annual transaction volumes reaching $33 trillion last year and stablecoins now accounting for 30% of all on-chain transaction volume.
The expansion comes at an interesting time for Ripple in particular.
According to market data from CoinDesk, XRP has been under pressure, down around 5% over the past week, amid a market sell-off sparked by the US-Iran conflict.
But the payments industry largely operates independently of the token’s price, and the trajectory of institutional adoption suggests that Ripple’s corporate strategy is gaining traction regardless of how the spot market evolves.
