Ripple Strengthens XRPL Ecosystem With Zilo and Licuido Equity Stakes

Ripple has deepened its UK partnerships with Zilo and Licuido by converting them into equity investments, strengthening its XRP Ledger (XRPL) capital markets stack with regulated transfer agency, digital issuance, and collateral mobility capabilities.

On August 3, 2026, Ripple announced strategic stakes in the two UK-based firms, formalizing existing commercial relationships into ownership positions. The move brings regulated ownership records, compliant issuance infrastructure, and collateral movement functionality directly into its XRPL-based financial ecosystem.

The investments target a critical bottleneck in institutional tokenization. Tokenized fund shares only become truly useful when they can be financed, pledged as collateral, and settled against cash with legal certainty. These requirements depend on regulated record-keeping, compliant issuance rails, and atomic delivery-versus-payment settlement — capabilities that Zilo and Licuido provide.

The announcement comes as XRP trades at $1.07, up about 0.5% over the past 24 hours and roughly 1.7% over the past week, with daily trading volume near $965 million.

Zilo and Licuido: Building Blocks of the XRPL Stack

Zilo delivers the transfer agency and fund administration layer, maintaining regulated records of ownership for tokenized fund shares — a prerequisite for lenders and counterparties to extend credit.

Licuido, regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), manages issuance, distribution, execution, and collateral mobility. This enables tokenized assets to circulate actively in on-chain markets rather than remain static on balance sheets.

Ripple’s dollar-backed stablecoin, RLUSD, acts as the settlement layer, enabling delivery-versus-payment transactions where asset transfers and corresponding cash payments occur simultaneously on XRPL, typically within seconds.

Together, these components — Zilo’s ownership registry, Licuido’s issuance and liquidity infrastructure, and RLUSD settlement — aim to complete the full lifecycle of tokenized assets on a single blockchain.

Institutional Traction: From Pilot to Production

Ripple’s investments build on infrastructure already in use. Licuido served as the tokenization provider for the Aviva Investors USD Liquidity Fund on XRPL, which launched on July 29, 2026, becoming the first tokenized fund approved by the Central Bank of Ireland on a public blockchain.

This deployment is part of a broader institutional push. Earlier in February 2026, Ripple partnered with Aviva Investors — which manages $345 billion in assets — to tokenize fund structures on XRPL.

In parallel, a memorandum of understanding with DBS and Franklin Templeton outlined plans for the sgBENJI tokenized money market fund to be used as repo collateral on DBS Digital Exchange alongside RLUSD, reinforcing the same collateral mobility framework these new investments aim to scale.

The Bigger Question: Liquidity and Real-World Utility

Ripple executive Nigel Khakoo emphasized that tokenization alone is not enough; the real value lies in enabling trading, settlement, borrowing, lending, and margining.

While XRPL has already demonstrated the ability to issue tokenized assets — as seen with Aviva and Franklin Templeton — the focus is now shifting to whether these assets can achieve meaningful secondary liquidity and function as usable collateral at institutional scale. The next 12 to 24 months will be critical in determining whether these markets become active or remain largely dormant.

Ripple is also participating in a UK government-backed task force alongside 54 firms, including Circle, BlackRock, and J.P. Morgan, to develop live tokenized repo use cases within the year.

Meanwhile, XRPL is preparing for a major upgrade with the upcoming xrpld 3.3.0 release, aimed at further enhancing tokenization and institutional finance capabilities.

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