Earlier this week Bloomberg reported that Ripple made a $4 – $5 billion bid for Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin. Circle apparently rejected the offer as being too low. At the beginning of the month, Circle published the offer documents to list its stock on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
Despite posting $1.67 billion in revenues in 2024, Circle earned just $156 million in profit, largely because it paid 60% of its revenues to distributors, particularly Coinbase.
On the one hand, the Ripple bid makes tremendous sense from Ripple’s perspective. But it’s also logical for Circle to reject it.
The rationale for Ripple to acquire Circle
Late last year Ripple launched the RLUSD stablecoin, which surpassed a market capitalization of $300 million during the past week. Circle’s USDC has an issuance of more than $61 billion. The challenge for Ripple is its desired target market for RLUSD overlaps with Circle’s USDC, which has an institutional bent.
Ripple is flush with cash
So Circle fits Ripple from a product positioning perspective, plus Ripple is flush with cash. It is still the largest holder of the XRP cryptocurrency, which has more than quadrupled in price since the US elections, despite having dropped a third from its January peak. Today XRP is valued at $2.22 or $130 billion in total. At the end of last year Ripple held 4.5 billion in XRP tokens outright, plus 38 billion tokens locked up in escrow. The outright XRP holdings are equivalent to $10 billion. However, it recently committed $1.25 billion to acquire prime broker Hidden Road, an active player in the FX markets.
If Ripple offloaded its 4.5 billion XRP over a short period, theoretically that should suppress the XRP price. That said, the XRP price is more driven by speculation than other cryptocurrencies, so it could go either way.
Why is the XRP price described as speculative? Because the current market capitalization of XRP is around 58% of Ethereum’s. If you use the fully diluted figure (including Ripple’s escrowed tokens), the total value of all XRP and Ethereum tokens are the same. Yet Ethereum’s daily active addresses are around 465,000, or twenty times more than the roughly 23,000 for XRP. That’s without considering the vastly different numbers of Ethereum developers and every other metric.
So for Ripple, it’s a great time to spend XRP. But any acquisition target that has to hold on to XRP for any period of time might worry about the sustainability of the token’s price.
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