Ripple Is Buying Back Up to $750 Million of Its Own Shares at a $50 Billion Valuation
Ripple has been buying back its own shares from employees and early investors in a tender offer of up to $750 million, pricing the deal in a way that values the company at roughly $50 billion. That’s a 25% jump from the $40 billion valuation Ripple carried just four months earlier, and it puts a very specific dollar figure on how much the company’s private equity has appreciated even as XRP’s own price has spent much of the same stretch struggling to hold its footing.
The mechanics are worth being precise about, because they get conflated constantly: this is a buyback of Ripple Labs’ private company stock, held mostly by employees and early-stage investors looking for liquidity, not a buyback or burn of the XRP token itself. Participants in the tender were able to sell shares back to the company at around $143.43 apiece, up from roughly $125 late in 2025. None of it changes XRP’s supply, gives token holders any equity claim, or creates a price floor under the token — a distinction that mattered enough to generate visible pushback on social media from XRP holders who felt the buyback rewarded insiders without doing anything for them directly.
Seen against Ripple’s own buyback history, the scale of this one stands out. The company repurchased about $285 million in shares back in January 2024 at an $11.3 billion valuation. An October 2025 attempt to buy back as much as $1 billion at a $40 billion valuation reportedly saw limited participation, with private holders largely unwilling to part with stakes they expected to keep appreciating. The current $750 million tender, run at a $50 billion valuation, suggests either that Ripple sweetened terms enough to get holders to actually sell this time, or that a broader market pullback made cashing out more appealing than it was a few months earlier — plausibly some combination of both.
The buyback also lands against a backdrop of Ripple spending aggressively to expand beyond its original cross-border payments business. In 2025 alone, the company acquired prime brokerage platform Hidden Road for roughly $1.25 billion and treasury management provider GTreasury for around $1 billion, both moves that push Ripple further into institutional financial infrastructure rather than staying confined to remittances. CEO Brad Garlinghouse has continued to strike a notably unhurried tone about an eventual public listing, telling audiences — including at the Wyoming Blockchain Symposium this August — that an IPO isn’t something the company is racing toward. A private company able to run a $750 million buyback while still funding billion-dollar acquisitions is, implicitly, arguing it doesn’t need public markets to keep growing.
Whether a rising private valuation for Ripple Labs translates into anything for XRP holders remains a genuinely open question, and one the market itself seems unconvinced about given the token’s muted reaction to the news. Crypto assets are highly volatile and this article is not financial advice. For more on how token economics differ from company equity, see coin680’s Bitcoin Academy.