Ripple’s long-term strategy to dominate financial infrastructure has gained strong validation from SBI Group President Yoshitaka Kitao, a key insider with deep ties to the company. Kitao, an early Ripple investor, former board member, and leader of a major Japanese financial conglomerate, publicly supports Ripple’s aggressive acquisition-driven expansion.
SBI Group’s backing is significant because it already plays an active role in Ripple’s ecosystem—running XRP validator nodes, offering XRP-based financial products, and integrating XRP into real-world payment systems through SBI Remit and MoneyTap.
Ripple is investing $2.45 billion to assemble a full-stack financial platform, acquiring firms across critical infrastructure layers:
Hidden Road (prime brokerage)
GTreasury (treasury management software)
Rail (stablecoin payment network)
Palisade (wallet custody)
Together, these components form what insiders call “Ripple 1”—a unified institutional financial ecosystem comparable to Amazon’s platform model, but for global finance.
At the core of this system are XRP and Ripple’s dollar-backed stablecoin RLUSD. RLUSD is already being used as collateral in prime brokerage operations, while XRP is embedded across payments, custody, and treasury functions.
Although there has been speculation about deep Amazon Web Services (AWS) integration, analysts clarified that Ripple’s use of Amazon Bedrock AI is currently limited to internal log analytics, with no changes to the XRP Ledger (XRPL) protocol itself.
With SBI’s endorsement, Ripple’s vision appears increasingly credible: it is not merely building products, but constructing a financial operating system, backed by one of Japan’s most powerful financial institutions.
#xpr #AI #Binance