Big Week Ahead: Ripple Heads to NYC With Wall Street Heavyweights

This week, Ripple will bring 1,500 of the world’s top decision-makers across traditional finance, crypto, academia and the XRP ecosystem to New York City.

Ripple is preparing for a major week ahead as the Swell 2026 conference brings together heavyweights from Wall Street, policymakers and C-suite leaders from banks, fintechs, corporates and asset managers to discuss the future of finance.

From October 27–29, 2026 at The Shed in Manhattan, leaders from across finance, crypto and the XRP community will come together for talks, panels and discussions.

For the first time in the event’s history, Ripple is combining Swell with Apex—its summit for the developers, institutions, and investors building on the XRP Ledger—and UBRI Connect, the academic conference for Ripple’s University Blockchain Research Initiative.

The speaker lineup includes Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, Ripple President Monica Long, alongside executives from major financial and technology companies including Terrence Duffy of CME Group, Tom Farley, CEO of Bullish, and senior representatives from BNY, Coinbase, Robinhood, Barclays, State Street and Jump Trading. Actor Matt Damon will also participate alongside Gary White, co-founder and CEO of Water.org.

New speakers have been added to the Swell lineup, including Luca Cosentino, Head of Digital Assets at Cross River; R.P. Eddy, CEO of Ergo; Lucas Zandoná Gomes, Community Manager at RedotPay; and Kazım Rıfat Özyılmaz, Co-Founder of Arf.

Expectations Rise

Swell has historically been where Ripple makes its most significant product and partnership announcements.

Ahead of the big event, Ripple and the XRP ecosystem have received recent announcements. In the past week, Arf announced a partnership with Ripple to bring RLUSD-powered settlement liquidity to licensed cross-border payment companies on the XRP Ledger (XRPL).

Ripple also announced a partnership with Cross River Bank to integrate RLUSD on the XRP Ledger into its core banking platform.

Meritz Securities announced a partnership with Ripple to bring institutional-grade custody and tokenization to Korea’s capital markets. This is Ripple’s first securities partner in Korea and its fourth Korean institution this year, after Kyobo Life Insurance, Kbank and Jeonbuk Bank.

Ripple is partnering with Privy, a Stripe company, to bring embedded wallets to the XRP Ledger. The integration will also enable agentic commerce through programmable wallets that let AI agents hold funds and transact, including through x402 payments.