Cryptocurrency veteran Austin King, who sold his company to Ripple in 2019 and worked at the decacorn for two years, shares his vision on the next phases of Ripple and XRP Ledger’s growth. Acquisitions of Metaco and Standard Custody, together with the hotly anticipated launch of Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin, highlight that B2B tokenization is a focus for Ripple.
Ripple betting big on tokenization with RLUSD launch and massive acquisitions
Asset tokenization and interoperability services for banking institutions will be in focus for Ripple in the near future. Such analysis was shared by Austin King, founder of Omni Network, who completed an exit of his start-up to Ripple in 2019. Post-exit, King worked at Ripple from 2019 to 2021.
Ripple has gone on a buying spree and has now acquired over $250,000,000 worth of companies.
What is the strategy here for $XRP?
As one of the founders who sold their company to Ripple, here’s what I believe they’re building towards: pic.twitter.com/TmL6uUPx5q
— Austin King (@0xASK) January 13, 2025
Last year, Ripple invested over $250 million in its acquisition strategy. Namely, the company acquired Metaco and Standard Custody to integrate them into the Ripple Custody solutions stack.
Also, Ripple released the mainnet version of Ripple USD, its NYDFS-regulated stablecoin pegged to U.S. Dollar. The asset itself is an example of a tokenization milestone for Ripple, Austin King stressed.
These two processes will amplify each other as Ripple will most likely be working on the tokenization of assets on XRP Ledger to benefit from both tokenization fees and transaction fees.
It should be noted that a similar scheme was already utilized by Ripple with its B2B-focused “On-Demand Liquidity Solutions.” XRP Ledger and its key asset, XRP, was integrated into the cross-border remittances services stack.
100x opportunity ahead of Ripple, here’s why
At the same time, the ambitions of Ripple might go far beyond XRP Ledger since it is able to expand its tokenization offering for banks to more blockchains.
King evaluates this omni-chain tokenization platform as a game-changer in digital assets for businesses:
Ripple bought my first company that was focused on interoperability. With my current company Omni, I want to support the $XRP Ledger’s opportunity to expand bank’s tokenized assets across all chains. This is the 100x opportunity this cycle, and we are laser focused on it.
As covered by U.Today previously, in 2019, Ripple acquired King’s Strata Labs via its Xpring unit. The start-up was among the first cohort interoperability ventures in the 2017-2021 crypto cycle.
XRP, a core XRPL cryptocurrency, is up by 7.8% in 24 hours. It is trading at $2.56 on major spot exchanges.
RLUSD stablecoin’s market cap sits at $53 million in equivalent.
