Ripple is branching out into mainstream finance even as the purpose of its most valuable asset, XRP, remains unclear

Ripple is a goofy business. For more than a decade now, the company has held vast quantities of magic beans known as XRP, which it dumps onto the market at regular intervals. It’s not clear why anyone needs these magic beans, but people buy them anyway, and that has made Ripple very rich—so rich that this week it casually spent $1 billion to buy a treasury management company called GTreasury. The question is how much longer Ripple can keep its magic bean factory humming.

Yikes