Ripple's Garlinghouse Celebrates Record Quarter After $4B Shopping Spree, Politely Asks Congress Not to Weaponize Policy Again

Ripple Labs CEO Brad Garlinghouse is feeling bullish. Actually, make that extremely bullish—the kind of bullish that comes from spending $4 billion in a single year and still having enough pocket change to acquire companies like they're Pokémon cards. During a Friday interview with Fox Business, the executive touted a record quarter for the San Francisco-based company, noting Ripple has been on an absolute tear since last year's high-profile acquisitions binge. When you've spent more than most countries' GDP on buying up the crypto ecosystem, quarterly records tend to look more like victory laps.

In 2025, Ripple pumped approximately $4 billion into the crypto ecosystem through investments, mergers, and acquisitions. The spending spree included purchases of Hidden Road for $1.25 billion and GTreasury for $1 billion. For context, that's roughly the cost of a decent-sized tech startup or, in crypto terms, about 2.5 million XRP at current prices—chump change for the XRP army, apparently. The acquisitions demonstrate Ripple's strategy of buying its way to dominance rather than organically growing, which either shows brilliant corporate foresight or that someone really, really likes shopping.

But it's not all celebration and champagne toast with XRP. Garlinghouse also warned that additional crypto legislation may take longer than expected, expressing concern about lawmakers potentially failing to deliver on the promise of pushing through more crypto regulation. The man who just spent $4 billion is now nervously watching Congress move at its trademark glacial pace, which for anyone familiar with DC knows means "meaningful legislation sometime before the heat death of the universe."

"A lot of eyes are on what is U.S. regulation going to look like and is it going to get done," Garlinghouse said. "We want to make sure we can't have another Gary Gensler moment where they try to weaponize policy in a way that is about politics, not about what's good for the United States." Translation: Please, for the love of all that is decentralized, don't let another regulator with a personal vendetta against crypto ruin our party. The guy literally built his entire regulatory legacy on suing every crypto company he could find—G