Ripple Gathers 1,500 Decision-Makers at Swell 2026 in New York to Showcase XRP

1,500 Delegates at The Shed

Ripple will open its Swell 2026 conference in New York on Tuesday, Oct. 27, gathering 1,500 senior decision-makers from traditional finance, digital assets, academia and the XRP ecosystem at The Shed in Manhattan. The event runs through Oct. 29 and, for the first time in its history, merges three tracks into one program: Swell itself, Apex, its summit for developers and institutions working on the XRP Ledger, an ecosystem that now spans payments and DeFi, and UBRI Connect, the academic conference tied to Ripple's University Blockchain Research Initiative. The speaker list pairs Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse and President Monica Long with Terrence Duffy of CME Group, Bullish CEO Tom Farley and executives from BNY, Coinbase, Robinhood, State Street, Barclays and Jump Trading. Duffy leads CME Group, the Chicago-based derivatives marketplace, while Farley runs crypto exchange Bullish. Newly added names include Luca Cosentino, Head of Digital Assets at Cross River; Ergo CEO R.P. Eddy; RedotPay community manager Lucas Zandoná Gomes; and Arf co-founder Kazım Rıfat Özyılmaz. Actor Matt Damon will appear alongside Gary White, co-founder and CEO of Water.org. The gathering doubles as a showcase for the XRP ecosystem inside the broader altcoin market, and it puts Wall Street, policymakers, bank executives and fintech teams in the same rooms rather than in separate industry silos. The company behind it builds blockchain payment and digital asset infrastructure with a focus on cross-border transfers and institutional use. Swell has historically served as the stage for Ripple's most significant product and partnership announcements. Traders will watch the XRP price through the three-day window for any headline reaction, and readers weighing an entry around the event can follow our guide on how to buy XRP.

Four Partnerships Before the Doors Open

Four partnerships landed in the run-up before the doors open. Arf announced a deal with Ripple to supply RLUSD-backed settlement liquidity to licensed cross-border payment companies operating on the XRP Ledger; RLUSD is Ripple's stablecoin pegged one-to-one to the US dollar. Ripple also reached an agreement with Cross River Bank to integrate RLUSD on the ledger into the bank's core banking platform, and Cross River's Luca Cosentino joins the Swell speaker list. In Korea, Meritz Securities said it will use its Ripple partnership to bring institutional-grade custody and tokenization services to the country's capital markets, marking Ripple's first securities partnership in Korea and its fourth Korean institutional deal of the year, following Kyobo Life Insurance, Kbank and Jeonbuk Bank. Custody in this context means storage arrangements built for securities firms, while tokenization is the representation of securities as blockchain tokens. Ripple is also working with Privy, a Stripe company, to add embedded wallet support on the XRP Ledger. Embedded wallets are wallet infrastructure built directly into an application, so users hold and move assets without leaving the app. The integration is designed to support agentic commerce, meaning transaction flows executed by software agents rather than a human at a checkout, through wallets that give AI agents the ability to hold funds and transact, in effect turning each into an AI crypto wallet, including payments through x402, a technical payment approach used for programmable, software-based transaction flows. The Korean deal extends a string of institutional agreements Ripple has closed in the country across 2026. The mood on the ground is already set: a post from RippleX engineer Mayukha Vadari relayed chatter from the Lower East Side, quoting the line “Ripple is a vibe” as Swell branding spreads across the city.

@msvadari · X post

“Ripple is a vibe”.

View on X

What the Early Deals Change

The front-loading changes what Swell 2026 has left to reveal. Ripple has already distributed this cycle's announcements across payments, banking, custody and wallet infrastructure, which frees the New York program to center on the Wall Street names in the room, from CME Group to BNY. The Meritz deal is the one to track for footprint: a fourth Korean institution inside one year makes the country a recurring base for institutional rollout rather than a one-off market. The Privy work points the ledger toward machine-driven payments. Expectation-heavy coverage tends to pull FOMO positioning into headline days; the measurable test is whether more RLUSD and custody agreements get signed while the conference is in session. Our XRP technical analysis page tracks the levels through the event.