Ripple and Settlemint Combine Custody With Tokenization
Ripple and Settlemint, a blockchain technology company specializing in digital asset lifecycle management, formed a strategic partnership to provide regulated financial institutions with an integrated system for issuing, holding, and managing tokenized assets. The partnership announced Sept. 1 connects Ripple Custody with Settlemint’s Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform, known as DALP, which allows institutions to manage issuance, compliance, custody, settlement, and servicing through one governed system.
“Financial institutions across Asia Pacific are putting digital assets to work. They are asking how to do more without stitching together separate solutions for custody, issuance and governance,” Fiona Murray, Ripple’s managing director for Asia Pacific, said, adding:
“This partnership gives them the foundation to roll out digital assets and future-proof them from there: Ripple Custody to hold and govern the asset, and Settlemint to manage its entire lifecycle.”
The combined offering addresses an operational divide between safeguarding digital assets and managing them after issuance. DALP provides controls for issuance, compliance, settlement, and servicing, while Ripple Custody governs how institutions store and control the assets. The announcement says running those functions on a single platform removes the multi-vendor assembly and reconciliation gaps that appear when institutions operate across separate vendors.
What the Integration Changes for Financial Institutions
Ripple Custody supplies the security, governance, and compliance infrastructure required to hold digital assets within an institutional environment. Ripple’s custody expansion through Securosys, Figment, Chainalysis, and Palisade added key-management, transaction-screening, wallet, and staking capabilities intended for banks and regulated enterprises.
Institutional custody systems increasingly function as control layers instead of stand-alone storage products. Ripple has positioned custody infrastructure as the foundation for payments, tokenization, staking, and treasury management as banks move digital asset projects from limited trials into production environments requiring audit trails and approval controls.
Settlemint extends that structure beyond asset protection by managing the processes surrounding a token throughout its existence. Real-world asset tokenization involves legal structuring, custody, compliance, distribution, servicing, and redemption, making token creation only one component of a regulated financial product.
Asia Rollout Could Shape a Wider Institutional Expansion
The partnership has begun offering the integrated system in Asia and plans extend the offering to other markets as institutional demand develops. Ripple already participates in live tokenization projects, including Aviva Investors’ tokenized liquidity fund share class on the XRP Ledger, which combines blockchain-based ownership records with established regulatory, custody, and investor-protection structures.
Ripple’s previous acquisition of digital asset custody and wallet provider Palisade expanded its ability to support scalable wallet deployment and rapid transactions. Adam Popat, CEO of Settlemint, said:
“Global capital markets are moving fully on-chain, and that shift only works when digital asset custody and lifecycle management operate as one system rather than two.”
The commercial opportunity extends beyond crypto trading into the infrastructure used to issue and service conventional financial assets. Boston Consulting Group estimates tokenized real-world assets could reach $88 trillion by 2035, representing roughly 16% of global investable assets under its progressive scenario. Its rapid-expansion scenario projects bank profits could fall about 30% compared with a market without digital asset adoption.
