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A fresh annual report of British company VivoPower PLC, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on November 2, 2026, officially disclosed the parameters of the closure of its cryptocurrency strategy.
The documents recorded the creation and subsequent liquidation of a $5 million stake in the private company Ripple Labs, while also making public the price of their buyback at $300 apiece.
A $100 million plan in XRP that failed
According to the filing, in May 2025, VivoPower announced a large-scale treasury expansion with a target investment volume of up to $100 million in XRP tokens and Ripple Labs equity. In practice, the investments turned out to be more modest: the XRP treasury allocated $5.0 million to the direct acquisition of 41,810 Ripple Labs shares in January 2026.
For institutional investors, buying stakes in the fintech giant itself was a key way to make a large bet on the ecosystem's success.
However, the experiment lasted only nine months from its announcement. As early as February, VivoPower's board of directors decided to fully wind down the crypto direction. Management recognized holding digital assets as less profitable than developing artificial intelligence infrastructure and redirected capital to the purchase of a 41.5 MW data center in Mo i Rana, Norway, for $37.7 million.
The process of liquidating this $5 million stake brought the crypto market an important price insight. In April 2026, Ripple Labs conducted a targeted buyback, taking 882 shares from VivoPower at $300 apiece. The deal brought the British company $264,600 in cash and $159,122 in net profit, giving the community a rare and hard marker of how Ripple's management itself values its business in private trades.
A direct sale of the remaining part of the stake on the open market proved impossible due to the non-public status of the securities. As a result, VivoPower entered into agreements to sell the economic rights to the shares to two South Korean partners, KWeather Co. and Lean Ventures.
As of the filing date, the Korean deals have not yet been legally completed. The remaining 40,928 shares are locked in the Korea Securities Depository (KSD) under a strict one-year lock-up restriction. Due to this freeze and the lack of market liquidity, independent appraisers lowered the book value of this stake to $4.3 million (about $106.16 per share).
The VivoPower story clearly showed the crypto industry the flip side of institutional investments: a direct purchase of stakes in Ripple Labs comes with strict lock-ups and low liquidity, where the only fast source of fiat for exiting the ecosystem is the issuer itself through a private buyback procedure.