According to Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, the fintech company is looking into various segments of the crypto industry for potential mergers and acquisitions. This comes as Ripple (XRP) enters its growth stage, with “a very strong balance sheet” that provides opportunities for future expansion.
In an interview with CNBC at the WEF in Davos, Switzerland, Garlinghouse stated that he expects there to be an increase in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space in the coming years.
“There is a lot of growth in crypto and we are looking a lot at different segments in crypto for growth. We’ve been investing in over 30 or 40 companies around the crypto ecosystem and we continue to look for opportunities to grow through external acquisitions also,” Garlinghouse said.
Around the world, interest in digital assets and blockchain technology is continuing to grow. And Ripple is at the forefront of this movement. In fact, the company just announced a partnership with the Center of Excellence on Blockchain Technologies at University College London. The aim of the deal is to explore “the rapidly-evolving world of digital assets at the enterprise level”.
This is an area that Ripple is particularly well-placed to understand, given its experience in working with some of the world’s biggest financial institutions.
With this latest partnership, Ripple is once again underlining its commitment to being at the cutting edge of the digital economy.
We teamed up with @uclcbt to detail the rapidly-evolving world of digital assets at the enterprise level.
Learn more about the future of both financial and non-financial corporate use cases for digital assets in our latest report. https://t.co/hmB6PgUcb8 pic.twitter.com/9o6hpWL6Lv
— Ripple (@Ripple) May 31, 2022
M&A activity in the cryptocurrency industry skyrocketed last year, with the global value of such transactions totaling more than $55 billion. That figure is up from just $1.1 billion in 2020, according to PWC.
The M&A boom coincided with a massive run-up in crypto prices that took Bitcoin (BTC) to an all-time high of nearly $70,000 in November 2021. However, since then prices have tanked, with BTC currently printing around $30,000, or 57% below its record high.
Despite the recent sell-off, the overall trend seems clear: M&A activity in the crypto industry is heating up and is likely to continue to do so in the coming years.
Meanwhile, in another interview with CNBC a week ago, Garlinghouse said that Ripple is looking into the possibility of an initial public offering (IPO) once its lawsuit with the SEC has been resolved.
Ripple has been facing off against the SEC in court since December 2020, when the regulator filed a lawsuit alleging that the blockchain-based payments network had sold unregistered securities through its XRP token. Ripple has argued that the digital coin is a currency, not a security, and should be regulated as such.
Price Action
As of press time, XRP is changing hands at $0.4091, down about 0.80% intraday. The $20 billion market cap coin- whose market dominance remains below 2%, traded in a range of $0.4089 – $0.4251, indicating volatility over the last 24 hours.
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