Standard Chartered has launched regulated institutional custody of Ripple's USD-pegged stablecoin RLUSD through its Dubai branch, offering eligible clients a regulated bank custodian for the dollar-pegged token on the XRP Ledger.
The bank, which manages nearly $450 billion in assets, also plans to collaborate with LMAX Group, an institutional trading venue for foreign exchange and digital assets, to enable clients to use RLUSD held at Standard Chartered as collateral for trading on LMAX's platform. This arrangement remains subject to documentation, testing, regulatory requirements, and internal approvals.
Under the planned structure, clients would not need to transfer their RLUSD to the trading venue to use it as collateral, separating custody from execution. Standard Chartered would hold the tokens while LMAX accepts their value to back trades.
This development supports Ripple's broader strategy to establish RLUSD as a settlement and collateral asset for institutional participants. Ripple provided LMAX with $150 million in financing in January to integrate the stablecoin into the group's infrastructure for institutional trading purposes.
Standard Chartered has been expanding its custody operations across multiple financial centers. The bank recently announced plans to offer institutional clients in Singapore custody for selected cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and tokenized real-world assets following its full acquisition of Zodia Custody earlier this year. It also became the first bank to distribute one of Hong Kong's two regulated stablecoins in August.
