Ripple announced strategic equity investments in UK-based firms Zilo and Licuido on August 3, 2026. The deals convert existing commercial partnerships into ownership positions, giving Ripple a full-lifecycle institutional capital markets stack on the XRP Ledger. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The two firms
Zilo handles transfer agency and fund administration. It provides a regulated record of ownership for tokenized assets. Its client roster includes Citi, Fidelity International, and State Street. Licuido is an FCA-regulated platform that manages issuance, distribution, and execution. It allows traditional financial assets to move as digital collateral through on-chain atomic settlement. Trades settle on the XRPL in three to five seconds.
How the stack works
The three-part stack consists of Zilo for regulated record-keeping, Licuido for issuance and collateral mobility, and Ripple's dollar-pegged stablecoin RLUSD for the cash leg. RLUSD functions as the regulated cash leg for delivery-versus-payment transactions. The move targets the gap where tokenized assets sit idle after minting due to lack of financing, pledging, and settlement reliability.
Nigel Khakoo, Ripple's SVP of Trading and Markets, characterized the infrastructure role of both firms in the official press release. Both investments build on pre-existing partnerships. Licuido was already in production as the tokenization infrastructure for the Aviva Investors USD Liquidity Fund.
Aviva fund live on XRPL
The Aviva Investors USD Liquidity Fund was the first tokenized fund structure approved by the Central Bank of Ireland on a public blockchain. It went live on XRPL on July 29, 2026. BNY holds the underlying assets and Komainu provides digital asset custody for the fund.
Ripple had a September 2025 memorandum of understanding with Franklin Templeton and DBS to list Franklin Templeton's sgBENJI tokenized money market fund on the DBS Digital Exchange alongside RLUSD, with a path toward using sgBENJI as repo collateral. That MOU has not yet resulted in a live product, but the Zilo and Licuido investments suggest Ripple is assembling the rails to make such arrangements routine.
With the equity stakes closed, the next concrete step is integrating Zilo and Licuido's services into a single workflow for institutional clients. Ripple has not given a timeline for when the full stack will be available as a packaged offering. The Aviva fund is the first live test of the model. Whether other asset managers follow will depend on how smoothly the three-second settlement and regulated cash leg perform at scale.
