Ripple is pairing its custody business with a tokenization platform for Asian banks. Ripple and SettleMint announced a strategic partnership today in Singapore that integrates Ripple Custody with SettleMint's Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform (DALP). The goal: give regulated institutions one system to custody, issue and manage tokenized assets, instead of stitching together separate vendors.
XRP market moves
XRP opened September 1 (00:00 UTC) at about $1.38, with a market cap near $86.5B (CoinGecko daily history). That's well up from about $1.06 a month ago, but below the August 24 snapshot high of about $1.52. CoinGecko shows about $2.0B traded in the 24 hours to today's snapshot, as volume cools after the late-August surge. Today is also the monthly escrow unlock (see our separate post).
What the partnership covers
The two pieces.
- Ripple Custody holds and governs the assets. Ripple says it has expanded the product over the past year with partnerships with Securosys and Figment, a Chainalysis integration and the acquisition of Palisade.
- SettleMint DALP handles the rest of an asset's life: issuance, compliance, settlement and servicing. SettleMint says DALP is in production and pre-production programs with institutions in North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific.
Who it's for. Banks, market infrastructure operators and other regulated institutions that need permissioning and compliance controls.
Where. The partners say they've already started offering it in Asia and plan to expand to other markets as demand develops.
What they said. "Financial institutions across Asia Pacific are putting digital assets to work," said Fiona Murray, Ripple's managing director for Asia Pacific. SettleMint CEO Adam Popat said custody and lifecycle management have to "operate as one system rather than two."
The market pitch. The release cites a Boston Consulting Group report from May 2026 projecting tokenized real-world assets could reach $88 trillion by 2035. That's BCG's projection, not a measured number.
Why Asia Pacific
Ripple has been busiest in this region all year. Its Korea deals with Kyobo Life, Kbank and Jeonbuk Bank, and RLUSD's launch in Japan through SBI, all point the same way. SettleMint already has offices in Singapore and Japan, so the partnership plugs Ripple Custody into a vendor those banks may already be talking to.
Question everything
This is an enterprise infrastructure deal, and it has the usual gaps. No named bank clients. No country-by-country rollout. No volumes. And nothing in the release says the tokenized assets will live on the XRP Ledger: SettleMint's platform is built to work across chains, and Ripple Custody holds many kinds of digital assets. The deal strengthens Ripple's custody business. It doesn't, by itself, create XRP or XRPL demand.
What people are talking about
Coverage so far mostly repeats the release. The more useful angle is the pattern: Ripple has now stacked custody partnerships, an acquisition (Palisade) and a lifecycle-platform integration within a year, which reads like Ripple building a full-stack offering for banks. Skeptics will ask, as they have all year, which chain and which settlement asset these banks actually use.
On-chain data
- XRP price: about $1.38 at 00:00 UTC (CoinGecko)
- Market cap: about $86.5B (CoinGecko)
- 24h volume: about $2.0B (CoinGecko daily data)
- Named APAC clients: not disclosed
- Chains used for tokenized assets: not disclosed
Flows and macro
August closed as the strongest ETF month in a while: US spot XRP ETFs took in about +$157.2M net, per XRP Insights, including +$3.6M on August 31. Almost all of it came in the second half of the month, alongside the broad crypto rally.
What to watch next
- First named institution using the Ripple Custody + DALP stack
- Which ledgers the tokenized assets are issued on
- Expansion beyond Asia
- Today's escrow unlock and the re-lock amount
The XRPTRACER take
It's a solid business deal for Ripple's custody arm in a region where it's been signing banks all year. For XRP holders, it's background, not a catalyst, until clients and chains are named. We're logging it on the Catalyst Tracker as a Ripple enterprise deal and tracking price on the Dashboard.
Sources: PR Newswire: Ripple and SettleMint partner on APAC custody and tokenization · SettleMint newsroom · CoinGecko XRP history · XRP Insights ETF flows
Price is CoinGecko's daily snapshot at 00:00 UTC on September 1, 2026. ETF flows through August 31.
Not investment advice. See our Disclaimer.
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