Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse used an on-stage conversation with Dan Morehead at Pantera’s Blockchain Summit 2025 to push back—again—on the notion that Ripple needs to list anytime soon, even as the company leans into aggressive buybacks, fresh capital, and M&A. The recording of the discussion was posted by Pantera on X on November 6.
Is A Ripple IPO Coming?
Pressed by Pantera on shareholder liquidity and tender offers, Garlinghouse disclosed the scale and cadence of Ripple’s private-market strategy. “We’ve actually repurchased over 25 percent of the company. We’ve spent $4 billion buying shares back from our shareholders,” he said, adding that “just yesterday [we] closed another billion dollar tender offer, valuing Ripple at about 40 billion dollars.”
He framed the approach as deliberately avoiding the need for a listing: “We haven’t needed to go public, and so we haven’t prioritized that… the way we kind of solve the shareholder liquidity problem is by just buying back shares at increasingly higher prices. I mean, to some degree, SpaceX has been doing that.”
The $40 billion private valuation Garlinghouse cited lines up with recent disclosures around Ripple’s capital moves this week. On November 5, Ripple disclosed a new $500 million investment at a $40 billion valuation and referenced the earlier $1 billion tender at the same mark—underscoring that private bids are coalescing near that level.
Garlinghouse also argued that public markets have become more receptive to crypto issuers, calling Circle’s 2025 listing a watershed moment. “Obviously, the window’s open. I will say as a very positive thing, I think a watershed moment for the crypto industry was the Circle IPO. People were worried about how that was going because it was during the tariff liberation day event, and the public markets weren’t sure, and to see how oversubscribed it was and see how, and even now, I think it’s a $35 billion company. I think that is phenomenal for crypto broadly,” Garlinghouse said.
Meanwhile, he acknowledged that not every crypto IPO will get the same traction. “Obviously, some of the other ones have gone public, whether it’s Bullish or Gemini, you know, haven’t gone quite as, I mean, they’ve done well, but not quite as well.”
The CEO’s message on Ripple’s own path was unequivocal: “We’re not in a hurry [to go public]… today we have, you know, just shy of $4 billion on the balance sheet. And so we’re not in a hurry to go public. And we feel like we can play offense from an M&A point of view and continue to stay private… At some point, I would imagine we’ll knock on the public market’s door, but that’s not today.”
Conviction Compounds.@Ripple CEO @bgarlinghouse joined @dan_pantera at Pantera Blockchain Summit 2025 to reflect on crypto’s beginnings and how the industry adapted through every cycle.
00:10 Crypto’s First Decade
02:17 Contrasting Money over IP and Voice over IP
04:19 XRP ≠… pic.twitter.com/SwMbeKnid8— Pantera Capital (@PanteraCapital) November 6, 2025
If the CEO’s posture leaves little oxygen for IPO speculation, Ripple’s president Monica Long removed any ambiguity during Swell in New York. Speaking to Bloomberg, Long said: “We do not have an IPO timeline. No plan, no timeline.” In a separate CNBC interview, she framed the rationale in balance-sheet terms: “We are not focused on an IPO right now. We have the balance sheet, the liquidity to be growing and making moves on M&A and other big strategic partnerships.”
At press time, XRP traded at $2.22.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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