C1 Fund Inc. now holds more Ripple stock than any other asset in its portfolio, overtaking Kraken's parent company. The shift comes as institutions add exposure to XRP through regulated ETFs, and as Ripple pushes into institutional lending on the XRP Ledger through a new partnership with Clearpool and Cicada.
C1 Fund Inc. (NYSE: CFND), a closed-end fund traded on the New York Stock Exchange, disclosed that Ripple Labs Inc. was its largest holding for the second quarter of 2026, accounting for 17.5% of net assets. That put Ripple ahead of Kraken's parent structure, Payward, Inc., which stood at 16.9%.
Ripple's private shares draw fresh buyers
With the fund's total net asset value at $6.49 per share, the position was shaped in part by Ripple's own partial share buyback program. That program brought C1 Fund a return of roughly 150% over four months. As of June 30, the fund had 77.5% of its capital, or $33.07 million, deployed across 11 private companies, including prediction market platform Polymarket.
Other conservative investors are following. In August, mutual fund Kinetics Internet Portfolio disclosed a stake of 1,875 Class A Ripple Labs shares valued at $246,000. Meanwhile custodian BitGo has already gone public, and Kraken and Blockchain.com have both filed confidential IPO registration statements with the SEC.
Institutions also buy XRP directly
Beyond private shares, major institutions are building exposure to XRP itself through regulated spot ETFs. August 13F filings showed Goldman Sachs allocating $86.5 million across five XRP ETFs. Jane Street also increased its stake in the Bitwise XRP ETF, and combined AUM of spot XRP products reached $1.5 billion in August. The SEC also approved Evernorth Holdings' Form S-4 for a SPAC merger and Nasdaq listing under the ticker XRPN, a fund that manages a treasury of 473 million XRP.
Ripple pushes lending onto the XRP Ledger
Ripple is also diversifying its own financing: its Ripple Prime division closed a $275 million private bond placement rated BBB by KBRA and joined the Clearpool credit fund to issue fintech loans denominated in the RLUSD stablecoin. Clearpool is building that credit infrastructure directly on the XRP Ledger with institutional partner Cicada, using the XLS-65 Single Asset Vault and XLS-66 Lending Protocol standards. Cicada will assess borrowers' financial position and credit history, while Ripple supplies the ledger and RLUSD for settlement and acts as a liquidity provider.
Vet, the XRPL Foundation's community lead and a dUNL validator, said institutional "lending is coming" to the network. The ledger is already processing around 1.09 million transactions per day. That activity has fallen 42.7% from earlier monthly levels, even as the ledger burns roughly 117.83 XRP daily in transaction fees. The lending market itself is not yet live on XRPL mainnet, so it is too early to say how much additional XRP demand it will create.
Sources: U.Today, Coinpedia Fintech News
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