Ripple Labs and SettleMint have announced a strategic partnership that integrates Ripple Custody into SettleMint's Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform (DALP), offering regulated financial institutions a single system to custody, issue, and manage tokenized assets across their full lifecycle.
Announced from Singapore, the offering is now live in Asia, with both companies planning expansion to other markets as institutional demand grows. Beyond banks, the partnership targets market infrastructure operators and sovereign entities, combining compliance, settlement, and servicing capabilities with custody and issuance functions.
"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," said Fiona Murray, Managing Director, Asia Pacific at Ripple.
Market Opportunity and Ripple's Infrastructure Build
The partnership references a Boston Consulting Group report from May 2026 projecting that tokenized real-world assets could reach $88 trillion by 2035. The report also estimates that banks failing to adapt could see profits decline by as much as 30% over the same period.
The offering incorporates RLUSD, Ripple's stablecoin, and XRP as underlying assets. Ripple has previously piloted RLUSD in Singapore's central bank sandbox with supply chain finance firm Unloq in March. The XRP Ledger was also featured in a cross-border pilot with JPMorgan, Mastercard, and Ondo Finance that settled tokenized US Treasuries in under five seconds.
Building the Custody Infrastructure
Ripple has assembled its custody infrastructure through a series of strategic transactions and partnerships. These include deals with Securosys and Figment, an integration with compliance analytics firm Chainalysis, and the acquisition of wallet infrastructure provider Palisade. The company has committed approximately $4 billion in cumulative merger, acquisition, and corporate venture spending on crypto infrastructure.
SettleMint, headquartered in Leuven, Belgium with offices in the UAE, Singapore, and Japan, operates its composable DALP in production and pre-production deployments across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific for banks, market operators, and governments.
