October was one of Ripple’s busies and most successful months in recent memory. But XRP failed to join the ride.
October was once known in the cryptocurrency industry as ‘Uptober’ as it brought some spectacular gains for years. As such, expectations were high for another one in the 2026 edition, but that didn’t materialize for a vast portion of the crypto assets, including XRP.
In contrast, the company behind the cross-border token spent most of the month expanding essentially every part of its institutional business, from prime brokerage and stablecoins to banking, custody, corporate treasury, and the XRP Ledger itself.
From Wall Street to Swell
October 1-10:
Ripple Prime expanded its relationship with hedge fund Brevan Howard at the start of the month, providing multi-asset prime brokerage, clearing, and financing services. The company also deepened its South Korean presence through a partnership with Meritz Securities focused on custody and tokenization, while its prime brokerage arm moved into leveraged ETF swap financing.
RLUSD was the center of attention for most of the month, beginning with its market cap flying past the $2.5 billion threshold.
October 10-20:
The XRP Ledger Foundation confirmed that a critical integer-overflow vulnerability dating back to 2015 was fixed, stressing that it had never been exploited to create additional XRP tokens. Shortly after, Standard Chartered launched institutional custody for RLUSD through its Dubai branch, while XRP-focused treasury company Evernorth began trading on Nasdaq after completing its SPAC merger with roughly 473 million tokens.
Evernorth also announced plans to work with Ripple, Coinbase, Kraken, and BitGo to deploy its XRP treasury through institutional strategies.
October 20-25:
Ripple backed the SEC’s proposed Regulation Crypto Asset framework while arguing that securities classification should focus on the investment contract rather than automatically treating the underlying token as a security.
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Ripple Prime added 24/7 RWA perpetual swaps, and Cross River Bank agreed to integrate RLUSD into its banking platform for payments, treasury operations, and conversions between dollars and the stablecoin.
After October 25 and Swell:
The company behind XRP introduced an expanded Ripple Treasury platform with AI-driven cash management and 24/7 Returns for qualifying digital assets. The OCC subsequently granted final approval for Ripple National Trust Bank, providing the company with a federally supervised entity for RLUSD reserves and enterprise digital-asset custody.
The firm also announced a broad partnership with Robinhood, covering RLUSD, institutional settlement, treasury operations, financing, and Bitstamp. BNY expanded custody support to both XRP and RLUSD, while Ripple and C2FO unveiled plans to use XRPL and the stablecoin for near-instant supplier-payment settlement.
Coinbase became the next major platform to expand RLUSD access across all of its platforms, while Ripple revealed that its annualized product revenue run rate is approaching $900 million, with more than 1,700 institutions, corporations, and enterprises using its infrastructure.
RLUSD received an A2 long-term and P-1 short-term investment-grade rating from Moody’s, with the latter representing the agency’s highest short-term grade for stablecoins.
XRP Stalled
It’s almost hard to believe, but all of those developments happened in a single month. And maybe we have missed a couple, even though we try to be as thorough as possible. You would think the only volatile cryptocurrency within that broader Ripple ecosystem would benefit from these, right?
It sounds logical, and it should be the reality, but it isn’t. XRP has frequently moved on hype, not the actual positive news. This doesn’t mean that it didn’t try to break out in October, as it started the month at around $1.50 and quickly aimed at $1.55. However, it was rejected violently at that point, and it has been mostly downhill since then.
The culmination took place on Friday after the infamous Binance hack. XRP, alongside most crypto assets, tanked hard and dropped to a two-month low of under $1.20. Although it rebounded to $1.25 at the end of the month, it’s still deep in the red in what was supposed to be Uptober.