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Ripple and SettleMint announced a strategic partnership on Sept. 1 that combines institutional digital asset custody with tools for issuing and managing tokenized assets, targeting regulated financial institutions across Asia Pacific.
The integration combines Ripple Custody with SettleMint's Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform, known as DALP, according to the official announcement. It is intended to give banks, financial market operators and other regulated institutions one foundation for custody, issuance, compliance, settlement and post-issuance servicing. The companies said the initial offering would target regulated financial institutions in Asia Pacific before possible expansion elsewhere globally.
Ripple Custody Secures Assets Through DALP
Ripple Custody provides infrastructure for holding and transferring cryptocurrencies, stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets. The platform supports configurable access controls, policy enforcement and approval workflows intended for institutional environments. Ripple describes the product as self-custody technology that institutions can install within their own infrastructure, meaning the institution retains control of its private keys instead of outsourcing control to Ripple.
The platform supports hardware security modules and multi-party computation for key management. Ripple also lists FIPS 140-2 Level 4 certification, ISO 27001 certification and SOC 2 Type II compliance among its security credentials on its official custody page.
SettleMint Covers Token Lifecycle Management
SettleMint's DALP covers the broader asset lifecycle. It allows institutions to design, issue and manage tokenized financial products while applying compliance, permissioning and governance rules throughout an asset's lifecycle. Tokenization involves more than creating a blockchain token representing a bond, fund, security or other asset. Institutions must also control investor eligibility, ownership records, corporate actions, transfers, settlement and redemptions.
SettleMint said DALP acts as a governed control layer for those processes. The platform covers issuance, compliance, custody coordination, settlement and servicing after a token launches. Under the partnership, Ripple Custody handles the storage and governance of digital assets while DALP manages the broader lifecycle. The companies said this arrangement could help institutions move from tests into production without assembling multiple disconnected products.
The announcement did not disclose which blockchain networks the joint service will support. It also did not state that institutions must use the XRP Ledger, XRP or Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin. The partnership therefore does not establish direct demand for XRP. No customer names, contract values, projected revenue or production dates were announced.
Ripple Expands Institutional Custody Network
The SettleMint agreement follows several additions to Ripple Custody. Ripple acquired wallet and custody company Palisade in November 2025 to add wallet-as-a-service infrastructure for payments, treasury operations and high-frequency transactions. Ripple later announced partnerships with Securosys and Figment in February. Securosys added cloud-based hardware security module support, while Figment introduced institutional staking capabilities. A Chainalysis integration added transaction monitoring and compliance tools.
Ripple has also started testing its custody infrastructure with financial institutions in Asia. Kyobo Life began testing tokenized Korean government bond settlement using Ripple Custody. That project remains a pilot and has no disclosed transaction volume or commercial launch date. Singapore has supported institutional experiments covering tokenized funds, stablecoin settlement and programmable collateral. DBS paired a tokenized money market fund with RLUSD through an arrangement involving Franklin Templeton and Ripple.
Asia Pacific Becomes First Market
Ripple and SettleMint said the combined offering had started in Asia and could expand to other regions as institutional demand develops. They cited a Boston Consulting Group forecast estimating that tokenized real-world assets could reach $88 trillion by 2035 under its progressive scenario, equal to roughly 16% of global investable assets. The $88 trillion figure is a forecast rather than a current market measurement. BCG estimated that publicly visible tokenized real-world assets were worth approximately $30 billion when it produced the report. Read more about Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin growth and Singapore's stablecoin framework.
