Ripple will hold its annual Swell 2026 event from Oct. 27 to 29 local time at The Shed in Manhattan, New York. It expects 1,500 key figures from traditional finance and the cryptocurrency industry, academia and the XRP ecosystem to attend.

U.Today, a blockchain media outlet, reported on Oct. 25 that Wall Street figures, policymakers and executives from banks, fintech firms, companies and asset managers will gather to discuss the future of finance.

This year, Apex, an XRP Ledger (XRPL) event for developers, institutions and investors, and UBRI Connect, an event for a university blockchain research programme, will also be held for the first time. The idea is to bring together finance, developers and academia to broaden exchanges across the XRPL ecosystem.

Key speakers include Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse (브래드 갈링하우스), Ripple President Monica Long (모니카 롱), CME Group Chairman and CEO Terrence Duffy (테런스 더피), and Bullish CEO Tom Farley (톰 팔리). Officials from BNY, Coinbase, Robinhood, Barclays, State Street and Jump Trading will also take part. Actor Matt Damon will appear on stage with Water.org co-founder and CEO Gary White (게리 화이트).

Luke Coscientino (루카 코시엔티노), head of digital assets at Cross River, R.P. Eddy Ergo (R.P. 에디 에르고), CEO, Lucas Zandoná (루카스 잔도나) Gomes, community manager at RedotPay, and Kazim Levent Ozilmaz (카즘 르파트 외질마즈), co-founder of Arf, have also recently been added to the speaker list.

Market attention is focused on what Ripple will announce at this year's Swell. Swell has previously been used as a stage to unveil major products and partnerships. Ahead of the event, cooperation news centred on XRPL and RLUSD also continued. Global payments platform Arf said last week it would work with Ripple to provide XRPL-based RLUSD payment liquidity to licensed cross-border payments companies. Cross River Bank also decided to work with Ripple to integrate XRPL-based RLUSD into its core banking platform.

Ripple is also working with Stripe affiliate Privy to introduce embedded wallets on XRPL. It is designed so that artificial intelligence (AI) agents can hold and transact funds through programmable wallets, and it also supports x402 payments.

The event is drawing attention as a venue where Ripple links financial institutions, developers, academia and payments businesses into one flow to broaden the scope of XRPL use. With Swell having also been a stage for major product and partnership announcements in the past, attention is on whether additional cooperation or business expansion plans centred on RLUSD and XRPL will emerge during the New York event period.

Overheard on the streets of the Lower East Side: "Ripple is a vibe" @RippleSwell everywhere!