Ripple spent October expanding its institutional business across prime brokerage, stablecoins, banking, custody and the XRP Ledger. XRP itself did not join the ride, and neither did a vast portion of the crypto market.
Ripple expanded nearly every part of its institutional business in October, but XRP failed to follow. October was once known in the industry as "Uptober" for its gains, and expectations were high for the 2026 edition. That did not materialize for a vast portion of crypto assets, including XRP.
Prime brokerage and RLUSD lead the early month
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 partnered with Meritz Securities in South Korea on custody and tokenization. Its prime brokerage arm then moved into leveraged ETF swap financing.
RLUSD drew most of the attention for much of the month. Its market cap passed $2.5 billion early on.
Ledger fix, custody launch and a Nasdaq debut
The XRP Ledger Foundation confirmed the fix of a critical integer-overflow vulnerability dating back to 2015. It stressed that the flaw had never been exploited to create additional XRP tokens.
Shortly after, Standard Chartered launched institutional custody for RLUSD through its Dubai branch. Meanwhile, 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.
Ripple backs SEC framework
Ripple then backed the SEC's proposed Regulation Crypto Asset framework. It argued that securities classification should focus on the investment contract rather than automatically treating the underlying token as a security.
Source: CryptoPotato
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