In a big week for Ripple, the payments giant has begun a $750 million share buyback on top of new plans to seek financial services licensing in Australia through the acquisition of a local payments company.
News of the buyback comes via reporting from CoinDesk, which cites anonymous sources inside Ripple. CoinDesk’s sources cited that the buyback was conducted at a valuation of $50 billion.
Ripple is also planning to secure an Australian Financial Services License (AFSL), a prerequisite for conducting financial services in Australia, by acquiring a local payments company, BC Payments Australia Pty. The news was announced on their website.
Though the AFSL does not require companies to be based in Australia, it does require companies seeking licensure to have sufficient presence in the country, including the incorporation of a local entity with at least one director being resident in Australia.
In announcing their intention to acquire BC Payments, Ripple linked the move to their own growing presence in the region:
“Ripple’s APAC payments volume nearly doubled year-on-year in 2025, reflecting strong regional momentum. The company works with leading financial institutions modernizing their payments infrastructure, including Australian customers such as Hai Ha Money Transfer, Novatti Group, Stables, Caleb & Brown, Flash Payments and Independent Reserve.”
Though Ripple already provides services in Australia, its desire to seek an AFSL is no doubt linked in part to a series of acquisitions last year, which expanded its infrastructure capabilities across two multi-billion-dollar deals.
In April 2025, Ripple announced it was buying broker Hidden Road for $1.25 billion. A prime brokerage and clearing company, Hidden Road had been expanding into digital assets since at least 2024 and boasted integrations with Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), OKX, and Bitfinex. The sale was completed in October, with Ripple rebranding Hidden Road to Ripple Prime.
The same month, Ripple announced the purchase of GTreasury for another $1 billion. GTreasury is a U.S.-based treasury management firm. GTreasury was primarily known for its cloud-based infrastructure for managing corporate cash treasuries.
As with Hidden Road, Ripple rebranded GTreasury as Ripple Treasury and announced it would introduce digital treasury management services to its portfolio. At the time, Ripple wrote:
“This isn’t about choosing between the old and the new. It’s about having both, seamlessly integrated, in a single platform.”
Such acquisitions are set to vastly expand Ripple’s infrastructure, which is likely why the company is seeking the AFSL as it embarks on more complex and regulated product offerings.
While Ripple executives have been coy about a potential IPO, it’s hard to view this latest flurry of activity outside of that context.
Reporting from Yahoo! Finance in February stated that a $50 billion valuation would make Ripple the ninth largest IPO candidate globally; in a world where all eyes are wateringly fixed on multiple nascent and ascending industries—from digital assets to memory— coming in anywhere in the top 20 is significant.
The latest moves have been met with mixed responses, particularly from holders of XRP, the company’s flagship token. While XRP is a key part of Ripple’s business, it does not entitle holders to equity in the business. Consequently, any move overly focused on increasing company valuation, such as buybacks and costly acquisitions, is likely to raise concerns that Ripple is using token holders to benefit equity stakeholders at the expense of efforts to buoy token values.
“Please explain in clear terms why it is good that Ripple uses the proceeds of XRP sales (selling premined coins) to acquire real companies and fund Ripple Labs stock buybacks, to the sole benefit of Ripple Labs shareholders,” wrote Zach Rynes, community liaison at ChainLink.
Ripple CTO David Schwartz gave a prickly response to these suggestions via Twitter, implying that a reduction in XRP price as a result of the buybacks was a bad thing, as ‘deliberately dumb’.
“One could equally well (actually, equally wrongly) make the argument that all of this is great for people trying to make a profit by holding XRP because it means that they can buy at a much lower price than they would have to otherwise,” wrote Schwartz.
Regardless, Ripple forges ahead. It will remain to be seen whether the latest moves are stepping stones toward an IPO or if, as executives are to be believed, an IPO is not coming any time soon.
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Source: https://coingeek.com/ripple-buyback-deals-signal-ipo-ambitions/
