Ripple Eyes $20B Circle Takeover

Ripple’s M&A appetite is ballooning almost as fast as the stablecoin market it hopes to dominate. Bloomberg sources say the San Francisco‑based payments company has quietly upped its offer for Circle Internet Financial—issuer of USDC—from an initial $5 billion to north of $20 billion. If consummated, the deal would hand Ripple the keys to the industry’s second‑largest stablecoin and tilt the entire sector’s centre of gravity away from USDT toward a Ripple‑centric stack of rails, tokens and prime‑broker pipes.

Talks come at a sensitive moment. Circle filed confidential IPO papers in January and has spent 2025 wooing regulators with a “compliance‑first” message. Ripple, fresh from a partial courtroom victory over the U.S. SEC and an aggressive $1.25 billion swoop on prime broker Hidden Road, appears eager to sew those narratives together: regulated stablecoins, institutional rails, and a payment network capable of settling trillions in tokenised fiat.

Crypto lawyer Bill Morgan speculates that last month’s launch of RLUSD—a Ripple‑branded enterprise stablecoin already integrated into Ripple Payments—was the opening gambit. Fold USDC’s $32 billion float into that mix and Ripple could field a dual‑stablecoin arsenal rivalling Tether’s dominance in minutes, not years.

Corporate strategist Brad Garlinghouse has hinted that Ripple’s 2024 private valuation of $11 billion is “old news” and floated an IPO once the SEC saga closes. Buying Circle at nearly double Ripple’s own price tag might sound audacious, but analysts note the firm now sits on deep war‑chest cash flows from its On‑Demand Liquidity corridors, plus fresh credit lines via Hidden Road’s $3 trillion‑a‑year clearing network. Control of USDC would also deliver a strategic moat: every DeFi pool, CEX order book and TradFi tokenisation pilot that currently relies on Circle would suddenly depend—directly or indirectly—on Ripple’s governance and rails.

Sceptics point to antitrust and systemic‑risk alarms. A merged Ripple–Circle entity would run two of the top five dollar‑pegged coins, dominate institutional settlement in the XRP Ledger ecosystem and potentially steer the policy conversation on Capitol Hill just as the GENIUS Act inches toward a vote. “This is market consolidation on steroids,” warns crypto commentator Crypto Eri. Yet supporters argue the combo could inject much‑needed scale, transparency and compliance heft into a market still scarred by 2022’s algorithmic‑stablecoin implosions.

Negotiations remain fluid. Bloomberg’s report says $20 billion is on the table, but Ripple CTO David Schwartz joked on X: “$6 billion, final offer 😉,” suggesting the numbers—and the leak itself—may be part of tactical brinkmanship. Circle, for its part, has kept silent, while insiders say an IPO remains Plan A unless Ripple’s cheque proves irresistible. Much rides on regulatory optics: acquiring a firm with a pending S‑1 could either fast‑track Ripple’s Wall Street ambitions or bog the deal in SEC scrutiny.

For now, the chessboard is set. A successful bid would place Ripple at the crossroads of stablecoins, prime brokerage and cross‑border payments—effectively making it the JPMorgan of crypto’s dollar economy. Fail, and Circle likely proceeds to float, while Ripple presses ahead with RLUSD and Hidden Road to court institutions on its own terms.

Ripple has always played the long game; this time the prize is the entire stablecoin endgame.