Ripple’s 2025 acquisition spree is starting to look less like opportunistic dealmaking and more like an attempt to build the “Amazon of financial infrastructure,” a vertically integrated stack that includes XRP and Ripple’s stablecoin RLUSD at the settlement layer, in the eyes of Digital Ascension Group CEO Jake Claver.
In one videoAccording to Claver, Ripple spent about $2.45 billion on acquisitions in the last seven months of 2025, arguing that the purchases are “pillars for a master plan” that reflects how Amazon built dominance by owning infrastructure rather than just selling products.
Why Ripple could be the ‘next Amazon’
The core analogy was explicit. “Amazon’s success came from building infrastructure, not just self-products,” Claver said. “You got AWS. It became the most profitable part of their business. That was the infrastructure. They own all the warehouses and logistics, the cloud and the marketplace.”
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His thesis is that infrastructure projects create structural benefits: lower marginal costs, faster iteration and higher switching costs once institutions integrate. “This vertical integration is rare in financial services,” he said, arguing that most companies “specialize in one layer or partner for the rest,” creating friction, delays and shifting blame when systems fail.
He also claimed that the endgame resembles “winner takes all momentum,” where “network effects make large networks exponentially more valuable than small ones” and “switching becomes prohibitively expensive” once workflows are embedded.
To explain the Amazon comparison, Claver mapped Ripple’s 2025 deals to what he sees as the minimum viable infrastructure bundle for an institutional “platform.”
“You need custody and settlement of assets. You need treasury management for business operations. You need payment rails that work 24/7, 365 globally,” he said. “You need stable coin infrastructure for efficient settlements. And you need settlement assets to move between all of these.”
He argued that Ripple put together these layers through a mix of older purchases and 2025 megadeals, culminating in what he called an end-to-end institutional product called “Ripple 1.”
The most prominent move in 2025, Claver said, was the $1.25 billion purchase of Hidden Road in April, now renamed “Ripple Prime.” His thesis: prime brokerage is the institutional ‘plumbing’ that makes large-scale trading and settlement possible.
“Prime brokers provide behind-the-scenes services that enable institutional trading,” he said. “They provide clearing. They ensure that trades between counterparties are actually settled. They provide custody and hold assets safely.” He added that Hidden Road served “over 300 institutional clients” and raised “over $3 trillion” by 2024, claiming the company has grown “3x” since announcing the acquisition.
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He also pointed out an integration hook intended to create internal demand for Ripple’s stablecoin: “Hidden Road will use RLUSD as collateral for prime brokerage products. And this creates organic demand for Ripple stablecoin with institutional adoption.”
The second pillar, he said, was Rail, which was acquired for about $200 million in August 2025 and is described as a stablecoin payments platform that operates 24/7 and reduces the need for companies to directly own crypto. He claimed Rail was expected to handle “more than 10%” of a $36 billion global B2B stablecoin payments market by 2025.
In third place was GTreasury, acquired for $1 billion after announcing in October 2025 and closing in December, which Claver described as treasury software used by large corporations that processes an annual payment volume of $12.5 trillion. The strategic value, he argued, is distribution: access to CFOs and treasurers through trusted software already embedded in corporate finance workflows.
The fourth, Palisade, announced in November 2025 with undisclosed terms, was framed as the “hot wallet” tier: operational wallet-as-a-service infrastructure for high-speed transaction use cases, complementing deeper custody solutions.
At the time of writing, XRP was trading at $2.10.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com