Ripple just spent $1 billion betting that corporate treasuries are ready for stablecoins.
On Thursday, the company announced it has spent $1 billion to purchase GTreasury, a firm with over four decades of experience in treasury services for Fortune 500 companies.
Now Ripple can tap into the multi-trillion dollar corporate treasury market and build relationships with some of the world’s largest companies, which increasingly need infrastructure to manage stablecoins alongside traditional financial assets.
The timing couldn’t be better. In the US, Congress has brought regulatory clarity for stablecoins, fostering a more predictable environment for corporate adoption. Moreover, the Trump administration has also ended the Biden-era crackdown on crypto platforms, allowing for mainstream financial institutions to integrate stablecoins into their operations.
Indeed, stablecoins are big business. They have ballooned into a $312 billion market. The top two, USDT and USDC, account for more than three quarters of the sector.
But Ripple wants to change that. The company’s in-house stablecoin, RLUSD, has seen lacklustre adoption — the stablecoin is 16th by market value with $830 million, and $195 million in 24-hour volume.
Distribution play
That’s where the GTreasury acquisition comes in.
Rather than convincing companies to adopt RLUSD from scratch, Ripple can now integrate its stablecoin directly into treasury management systems that thousands of companies already use daily.
How? GTreasury offers software that corporate treasurers use to manage cash, payments, and foreign exchange across multiple banks and currencies. When a customer wants to make an international payment today, they initiate a wire transfer through GTreasury that typically takes days to settle and costs money in correspondent bank fees.
With Ripple’s integration, that same treasurer would see a new payment option in their workflow: RLUSD. It’s faster, cheaper, and already built-in.
According to GTreasury, the firm has integrated over 13,000 banks and handles $12.5 trillion in annual payments volume.
Combining the payments company with the platform will allow corporate treasurers — until now beholden to traditional business hours — to move money instantly and across borders.
Tokenisation wave
For Ripple, stablecoins aren’t the only ingredient of interest in this deal.
The acquisition also places Ripple right at the centre of the broader tokenisation trend that has been sweeping corporate finance. The trend, analysts say, could become a $19 trillion market.
Right now, about $13 billion worth of so-called real world assets have been tokenised. And it’s not just crypto-native companies bringing traditional assets onchain — BlackRock’s tokenised treasury fund, BUIDL, has grown to $2.8 billion in assets, according to DefiLlama.
These products allow companies to earn yield on cash while maintaining instant liquidity and settling instantly 24/7 — something that traditional treasury systems have been unable to offer. Until now.
