The Linqto Overhang in Ripple's Stock

TLDR: there was a huge forced seller in Ripple’s common stock, and they finished selling a few days ago. The liquidators of Linqto sold a little over 1.7 million shares, or about 1% of the company, at a $76.14 VWAP, against a current market price of around $100; the buyers were long-only buy-and-hold shops, primarily Galaxy Digital and Arrington Capital. I’d estimate that a similar amount of stock—again, about 1.7 million shares—remains to be sold through the Linqto liquidating trust, but the trust will sell over five years instead of all at once.

Ripple’s common stock has been grinding lower over the last six months, in line with the continuing selloff in XRP and in crypto markets more broadly. There’s been steady selling and very limited buying: it’s a very crude metric, but the number of active bids on Hiive has ranged between 10 and 20, against more than a hundred offers. That imbalance has fed through to the market price, which is around $100/share now, down from about $150/share in December and sharply lower than the last tender offer (which closed in April at $300/share).

You’d think most of the participants in the market for Ripple common would be long-term unleveraged shareholders who don’t have flighty LPs or loose redemption terms, so it would be pretty unusual to see a forced seller in the market. But that’s what’s happening right now, thanks to the spectacular implosion of Linqto¹, which was one of the most active platforms for small purchasers of Ripple stock until it collapsed into Chapter 11 restructuring in July 2025. Linqto owned a lot of Ripple stock, and thanks to its shockingly poor internal controls, that stock was never transferred to SPVs and instead remained with the company itself until the implosion.

That huge lump of Ripple stock is now being distributed to Linqto’s customers through two vehicles. Investors could choose whether they wanted to receive:

• Stakes in a liquidating trust (henceforth the LT), which will sell down shares over five years; or,
• More interestingly for our purposes, shares in a closed-end fund. The CEF will hold the shares attributable to customers who didn’t elect to join the liquidating trust.

As part of the restructuring confirmation order, the CEF isn’t allowed to hold more than 25% of its assets in any single private company. Because Ripple was such a big part of Linqto’s business, and because Ripple isn’t public (and, per statements from senior management, they’re not planning to go public any time soon), Linqto was forced to sell part of its Ripple holdings so that the CEF’s Ripple holdings won’t breach the 25% threshold on day one.

The sale amounts and prices were disclosed in a court filing that hit the docket on Friday, requesting accelerated approval for the share sales. When you read these, keep in mind that the current market price is about $100, but also that block trades usually require a liquidity concession on the price:

• Galaxy Digital was the biggest buyer: they bought about 882,000 shares at $68. That’s a steep discount from the price they paid when they participated in Ripple’s November 2025 raise, which would’ve been somewhere around $245/share based on the $40bn valuation reported in the press and the most recent known share count of about 163 million (as of the end of September 2025, so, a bit out of date);
• Arrington Capital also bought a big chunk: about 624,000 shares at $80;
• The Private Shares Fund (a US mutual fund) bought 160k shares at $100; and,
• GAM Alternatives UCI Part II (a Luxembourg SICAV) bought 40k shares at $100.

(The last two are both managed by the same advisor: Liberty Street Advisors.)

This sale has removed a big overhang from the market for Ripple stock. It also raises another interesting question: can we figure out how much stock still has to be sold through the liquidating trust, versus how much stock will be locked up in the CEF?

We know the following:

• Linqto Liquidshares owned $398.8mm of Ripple stock at the end of September 2025, and their mark was $84.54 per share, so that’s 4.71mm shares (and Ripple made up about 60% of Liquidshares’ holdings by value, which we’ll come back to in a sec)
• There were no rescission claims for Ripple stock;

But we don’t yet know the breakdown of how many Ripple shares will go to the LT or go to the CEF. We can guess, though!

If we guess that five-eighths of creditors elected the CEF, then the numbers work out like this:

• 63% to the CEF means that it would have held 2.96mm shares. If that was 60% of its holdings², and it had to sell down to 25%, then it would’ve had to sell 1.73mm shares, which is close enough to what we saw hitting the market last week; and,
• 37% to the liquidating trust means there’s another 1.7mm shares to sell over the five-year lifetime of the trust.

As a final thought… once the CEF starts trading, it’ll be another listed vehicle for Ripple equity (there’s also Tetragon in London, which has appeared previously in this blog). I wonder where we’ll land on the implied valuation of Ripple common via the CEF.