Garlinghouse called XRP Ripple's "North Star" while building toward trillion-dollar infrastructure ambitions. Here's what that actually means.
Why Ripple's CEO Just Called XRP the North Star
There's a particular kind of statement that CEOs make when they want to reassure a community — the kind that sounds definitive but leaves room for interpretation later. And then there's what Brad Garlinghouse said this week at XRP Community Day 2026.
"XRP is the North Star for Ripple. It's our purpose."
No hedging. No corporate doublespeak about "exploring opportunities" or "strategic positioning." He placed the token — not blockchain technology, not distributed ledgers, but XRP specifically — at the exact center of Ripple's long-term strategy.
What made the statement structurally interesting wasn't the words themselves. It was the operational reality he described underneath them. Ripple spent approximately $4 billion in 2025 on acquisitions. Hidden Road — a firm that cleared $3 trillion annually serving 300+ institutional clients — was rebranded as Ripple Prime. GTreasury, a leader in treasury management systems, became Ripple Treasury. Rails, focused on custody infrastructure, was folded in. Every single acquisition has been explicitly reoriented to serve the XRP ecosystem. Not crypto broadly. XRP specifically.
That's not marketing. That's architecture.
Garlinghouse also outlined Ripple's roadmap for 2026, which he described as a "year of integration" following the acquisition spree. The firm isn't looking to do another major M&A round soon — though he left the door open for the second half of the year — because they're focused on making sure the pieces they just bought actually work together. Ripple Prime handles institutional prime brokerage. Ripple Treasury provides risk management, FX tools, and compliance frameworks. RLUSD, Ripple's dollar-backed stablecoin, is being tested for real-time card settlement on Mastercard's network via WebBank and Gemini — the first U.S.-licensed bank conducting card settlement directly on a public blockchain with a regulated stablecoin.
All of it flows through the XRP Ledger.
The stated ambition? Ripple wants to become a global financial platform company by 2030. That's trillion-dollar infrastructure territory — competing not with Ethereum or Solana, but with Swift, which moves an estimated $5 trillion in daily transaction volume. Garlinghouse has previously suggested that Ripple could capture 14% of Swift's volume within five years. If that happens, the demand profile for XRP changes entirely.
But here's the tension. Ripple the company is currently valued around $40 billion. XRP the token has a market cap of roughly $83 billion. The token is trading around $1.36 — down sharply from the $3+ peak it hit in August 2025. The fundamental narrative that Garlinghouse laid out this week and the price action over the past six months are having completely separate conversations.
What's interesting is that the infrastructure buildout is happening regardless of token price. Ripple secured an Electronic Money Institution license in the UK this year. XRP ETFs raised over $700 million in inflows within weeks of launching. The network itself continues to process fast, low-cost cross-border settlements, which was always the product-market fit thesis. The question isn't whether Ripple is building something real. The question is whether XRP — the token — will capture proportional value if the infrastructure thesis plays out.
That gap between "building a trillion-dollar platform" and "token trading at $1.36" is the story worth watching in 2026.