Ayo Akinyele, Head of Engineering at RippleX, says the crypto market has moved past the legal noise that once overshadowed $XRP and is now paying attention to what the technology can actually do.
“I think the market is very much shifting back to technology because the use cases are real,” Akinyele said in a recent interview on the Thinking Crypto Podcast.
He explained that years of SEC headlines pulled focus away from institutional interest that was quietly building underneath. “What has happened over the last few years is that the SEC headlines sort of distracted people from the institutional demand that was kind of an undercurrent,” he said. “And I think because that’s out of the way, those use cases are now coming to fruition.”
According to Akinyele, institutions are gravitating toward the $XRP Ledger specifically because it is decentralized and built around low-friction financial primitives that are harder to access elsewhere. He pointed to cheap settlement, low fees, and fast, predictable execution times as the core advantages drawing real-world use cases on-chain.
JPMorgan, Mastercard, and Ondo Finance Pilot Tokenized Treasuries on XRPL
Akinyele also addressed a recent collaboration involving Ripple, JPMorgan, Mastercard, and Ondo Finance, where tokenized treasuries were used to fund cross-border transactions on the $XRP Ledger.
“I think because of Ripple’s reputation as a financial institutional home of sorts, I think it was a natural progression of the things that Ripple had been invested in,” he said. He described the pilot as built around XRPL’s low-friction approach to tokenizing assets, with the real value coming once those assets need to move.
“Once the assets are tokenized, then it becomes about the movement of those assets,” Akinyele said. “The mobility, the settlement times, the ability to connect on-chain markets with off-chain systems, that’s really where all of this is still coming together.”
He highlighted the ability to manage liquidity around tokenized treasuries and cash out quickly as a standout feature of the partnership. “I think that is something to be able to do quickly, and sort of without some of the friction that we’ve seen in traditional finance,” he said.
Beyond Payments: XRPL as a Digital Asset Manager
Akinyele described the ledger’s evolving role as something closer to a digital asset manager, encompassing not just treasuries but credit markets and stablecoins as well, including Ripple’s own RLUSD.
“I think that is a good comparison,” he said when asked if the $XRP Ledger now functions as an on-chain asset manager. “The management piece also includes the credit markets. So it’s all wrapped into just one-stop shop where you can get all sides of it.”
He said that Ondo Finance’s OUSG treasury fund and Mastercard’s multi-token network are both represented on XRPL, reinforcing the ledger’s role as connective infrastructure between traditional finance and on-chain systems.
“We’re not trying to replace the existing financial infrastructure,” Akinyele said. “We’re trying to just upgrade it in a way that we can unlock more without actually changing what’s on the surface.”
