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Ahmed Barakat
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In the latest XRP News, Ripple announced strategic equity investments in two UK-based firms, Zilo and Licuido, on August 3, 2026, converting existing commercial partnerships into ownership positions to complete a full-lifecycle institutional capital markets stack on the XRP Ledger.
The move targets the gap that has stalled most institutional tokenization pilots: minting a token is straightforward; financing, pledging, and settling it with the same reliability as a conventional holding is not.
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The Problem: Tokenized Assets That Sit Idle
Institutional RWA tokenization has exhibited a consistent structural failure: tokenized fund shares are issued and then parked.
The ownership record, issuance rail, and settlement mechanism have historically been handled by separate, often incompatible legacy systems that were never designed to interface with on-chain collateral markets.
Ripple’s framing of the deal is explicit on this point. The company described the investments as addressing constraints in which collateral sits idle, settlement takes longer than necessary, and institutions have no reliable path to unlock liquidity from tokenized positions.
The Zilo and Licuido stakes are designed to close those three gaps simultaneously on XRPL.
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XRP News: What Zilo and Licuido Each Provide
Zilo handles transfer agency and fund administration – the regulated record of who owns what, extended to cover tokenized share classes as funds move on-chain. Before any lender will extend credit against a tokenized fund position, they need a legally reliable ownership register; Zilo supplies that layer. Its client roster, which includes Citi, Fidelity International, and State Street, provides Ripple with a direct bridge into incumbent custody and TA infrastructure.
Licuido, an FCA-regulated platform, manages issuance, distribution, and execution, allowing traditional financial assets, including fund shares, to move as digital collateral through on-chain atomic settlement.
Trades settle on the XRPL in three to five seconds. Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, RLUSD, functions as the regulated cash leg for delivery-versus-payment transactions, so asset transfer and payment settle simultaneously rather than sequentially.
Together, the three-part stack – Zilo for regulated record-keeping, Licuido for issuance and collateral mobility, RLUSD for the cash leg – gives institutions a single operating model for tokenized fund assets from issuance through financing. Neither company’s financial terms were disclosed.
Nigel Khakoo, Ripple’s SVP of Trading and Markets, characterized the infrastructure role of both firms in the official press release: “ZILO and Licuido provide core capabilities that are essential to further scaling this shift: regulated digital transfer agency infrastructure and liquidity for issuance and collateral mobility.”
Building on Live Deployments, Not Pilots
The stakes are not speculative bets on unproven vendors. Ripple confirmed that both investments build on pre-existing partnerships, and Licuido was already in production as the tokenization infrastructure for the Aviva Investors USD Liquidity Fund, the first tokenized fund structure approved by the Central Bank of Ireland on a public blockchain, which went live on XRPL on July 29, 2026.
BNY holds the underlying assets; Komainu provides digital asset custody.
The institutional pipeline extends further. Ripple’s parallel push into institutional infrastructure also encompasses a September 2025 memorandum of understanding with Franklin Templeton and DBS to list Franklin Templeton’s sgBENJI tokenized money market fund on the DBS Digital Exchange alongside RLUSD, with a stated path toward using sgBENJI as repo collateral.
The collateral-mobility thesis Ripple is industrializing through Zilo, and Licuido is the same structure that the partnership was designed to test.
On the network side, Ripple reported that XRPL has processed more than four billion transactions since 2012 and is maintained by 120 independent validators. A major protocol upgrade, xrpld 3.3.0, targeting improvements in XRPL infrastructure and institutional finance functionality, was expected to be released within days of the announcement.
Ripple is also one of 54 firms on a UK government task force formed to build live tokenized wholesale financial market use cases over the next 12 months, alongside Circle, Coinbase, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley. The first target is the tokenized repo. Ripple’s expanding regulatory positioning in Europe provides additional runway for the institutional tokenization push built on XRPL.
The practical test for the Zilo and Licuido stack is whether tokenized fund shares generate genuine secondary liquidity and serve as working collateral in live credit markets over the next 12 to 24 months – or whether they remain a more sophisticated form of the same idle token problem Ripple is explicitly trying to solve.
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