Ripple has made strategic investments in two UK fintech firms, Zilo and Licuido, as it builds out the regulated infrastructure needed to run tokenized capital markets on the XRP Ledger.
The stated goal is specific. Ripple wants tokenized funds to work as collateral from the moment they are issued, rather than sitting still. It is a sensible thing to build, and the available data suggests almost nobody is using that capability yet.
What the Investments Cover
Zilo provides global transfer agency asset solutions for wealth managers and has raised $58.7 million in total equity funding, according to data compiled by Traxcn. Licuido is a tokenization solutions provider authorised and regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority. Both are headquartered in the United Kingdom.
Financial terms were not disclosed in Monday’s announcement, and Ripple did not say what stake it acquired in either company.
Licuido is the name to note. It supplied the tokenization infrastructure behind Aviva Investors’ tokenized share class of its US Dollar Liquidity Fund, launched on XRPL last week after approval from the Central Bank of Ireland. Ripple has now invested in the company that built its most prominent XRPL fund launch to date.
What ‘idle collateral’ actually means
Ripple says the combined capability addresses the problem of idle collateral. The idea is more straightforward than the phrase suggests.
When an institution buys into a money market fund, that holding usually sits in a custody account doing one job. To borrow against it, the institution has to go through a separate process with separate paperwork, often taking days. Making a fund usable as collateral from the point of issuance means the holding can back a loan or a margin position immediately, without that second process.
The benefit is real and it is an efficiency argument rather than a returns argument. It is also the same benefit tokenization has been promising institutional finance for several years.
The market Ripple is buying into is small, and barely used
XRPL ranks as the 11th-largest blockchain network by tokenized real-world assets, holding $368 million. Ethereum leads with $17.1 billion, according to RWA.xyz.
Eleventh place sounds respectable until the two figures are set side by side. XRPL holds roughly 2% of what Ethereum does. Ripple is investing in infrastructure to compete in a category where its own chain is currently a small fraction of the leader.
The deeper question is whether tokenized collateral is a business yet. A RedStone report published last week found that of roughly $4.2 billion in tokenized gold in circulation, only about $63 million was being used as collateral in decentralised finance, a utilisation rate of 1.5%. The capability existed. Almost nobody used it.
Across the wider market, the total value of tokenized assets rose 1.5% to $37.3 billion over the past 30 days, while the number of RWA holders jumped 50% to 1.57 million. Those two figures moving at such different rates means the average holding shrank considerably, which is more consistent with incentive programmes and small new entrants than with institutions allocating capital.
Recent Ripple Activity
Last month Ripple launched Ripple Mint, a platform giving institutions new routes to access, mint, redeem and manage its US dollar-pegged stablecoin, Ripple USD (RLUSD). The Zilo and Licuido investments continue the same pattern, building the regulated infrastructure layer beneath its on-chain financial products rather than launching consumer-facing ones.
For XRP holders the read is familiar. Institutional infrastructure on the XRP Ledger and demand for the XRP token are connected but not the same thing, and nothing in this announcement changes what the token does. XRP traded around $1.06 on Tuesday, down about 1.4% on the day, with no visible reaction to the news.
What would make this a genuine shift is the thing nobody has produced yet: evidence that institutions are actually posting tokenized funds as collateral in size. Ripple is building for that outcome. The current data does not yet show it arriving.
XRPL’s Position in the Tokenized RWA Market
XRPL currently ranks as the 11th-largest blockchain network by tokenized real-world assets, carrying $368 million in tokenized RWAs. Ethereum leads the category with $17.1 billion in tokenized RWAs, according to data provider RWA.xyz.
Across the broader market, total RWA holders rose 50 percent to 1.57 million over the past 30 days, while the total value of tokenized assets climbed 1.5 percent to $37.3 billion.
