Blockchain payments startup Ripple is looking for new investments and acquisitions, with several deals reportedly underway, according to the company’s CEO.

The announcement comes in light of Ripple's Q2 report, which details that total sales of the company's native XRP token increased nearly 48 percent to $251 million. This growth was driven primarily by strong growth in institutional sales.

In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, said: “We are in a very strong position, our business is growing strongly, we have a strong balance sheet, and I intend to use our advantage.”

Also, it looks like Ripple's 10 percent stake in MoneyGram has paid off. Last week, the money transfer company announced that it had begun using Ripple's xRapid transaction product to maintain liquidity when making international transfers. According to Garlinghouse, MoneyGram has integrated Ripple's technology with its US dollar to Mexican peso and US dollar to Philippine peso pairs and will "scale up" the service in 2020.

Garlinghouse did not specifically say which companies or industries Ripple is targeting, but did mention that Ripple has the option to invest another $20 million in MoneyGram at the original purchase price.

“Anything we can do to accelerate our growth and give us more options to meet customer needs is a good place,” he said. “We are probably the largest blockchain and cryptocurrency investor on the planet. We have publicly announced we have invested about $500 million [investment] in space over the past 18 months."

In the past, Ripple has promoted use cases for its own currency by integrating with firms. In the first two quarters of 2019, the company released 1.6 billion of its coins from escrow to develop projects on RippleNet.

The company still owns almost 55 percent of the total supply of its coin, worth around $13.7 billion.