Ripple agreed to acquire Fortress Trust in licensing push

Ripple announced on September 8, 2023 that it had agreed to acquire Fortress Trust, a Nevada-chartered trust company supplying custody-adjacent, payments and compliance infrastructure to blockchain businesses. The proposed transaction was a bid to put regulated financial infrastructure alongside Ripple’s payments and digital-asset products.

The deal was not complete on September 8. Ripple’s formal release said closing remained subject to due diligence and regulatory approvals. Financial terms were not disclosed. Fortune reported contemporaneously that a Ripple spokesperson described the consideration as a mix of cash and equity, but neither component was quantified.

That distinction matters because several event-day headlines used the language of a completed acquisition. The primary record supports an agreement to acquire, not a closed change of control.

A license-led expansion

The Nevada Financial Institutions Division’s list of state-chartered trust companies included Fortress Trust LLC. Ripple said Fortress’s technology supported payments, asset tokenization and other business-to-business services, and described the Nevada trust license as complementary to its own regulatory footprint.

Ripple also said it and its subsidiaries held a New York BitLicense, more than 30 U.S. money-transmitter licenses and in-principle approval for a Major Payment Institution license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Those were company representations in the announcement, not a finding that one license authorized every product or jurisdiction.

Because the Fortress transaction still required review, the announcement did not itself establish that Fortress’s charter had transferred to Ripple. The defensible event-day interpretation is narrower: Ripple was using mergers and acquisitions to pursue regulated entry points for institutions that wanted to convert, store or move value using blockchain-based systems.

Building beyond payments

Ripple was already a minority investor in Fortress parent Fortress Blockchain Technologies, having joined its seed financing in 2022. It said that, after closing, it planned to invest further in the parent and its FortressPay unit. Those statements described intended future steps; they did not demonstrate completed integration on September 8.

The proposal followed Ripple’s May 2023 purchase of Swiss digital-asset custody provider Metaco for $250 million. Fortune characterized Fortress as Ripple’s second acquisition of 2023. Together, the two announcements showed a strategy of buying institutional infrastructure rather than relying only on organic development around cross-border payments.

The Fortress terms were materially less transparent than the Metaco price. No public transaction agreement, valuation, revenue figure, customer count or closing timetable accompanied the September 8 announcement. Ripple’s statements that Fortress had recurring revenue and a roster of crypto-native and newer industry customers were attributable company claims, not independently audited metrics in the reviewed record.

What the event did—and did not—prove

The significance of September 8 was institutional, not a verified token-market reaction. The agreement signaled that licensing, custody-related controls and back-office technology had become strategic assets for a major crypto company. It did not change the XRP Ledger protocol, decide XRP’s legal treatment, transfer the Nevada charter immediately or prove that the combined business would close.

No XRP or broader cryptocurrency price move is attributed to the announcement. The reviewed sources did not provide a single venue, benchmark, observation timestamp or event window sufficient to isolate the deal’s effect from continuous, fragmented crypto trading.

Later context

On September 28, 2023, Ripple chief executive Brad Garlinghouse said the parties had signed a letter of intent but Ripple had decided not to proceed with an outright acquisition. He said Ripple would remain an investor in Fortress. That later outcome confirms why the September 8 record must be framed as a conditional agreement rather than a completed purchase.