Ripple Had a Massive October, but XRP Went the Other Way

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. 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. 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. 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. Ripple Prime

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