Ripple Acquires Equity Stakes in Zilo and Licuido to Unlock Idle Tokenized Assets

In a strategic move to address key bottlenecks in institutional tokenization, Ripple announced equity investments in two UK-based firms, Zilo and Licuido, on August 3, 2026. By converting existing commercial partnerships into ownership positions, Ripple aims to complete a full-lifecycle institutional capital markets stack on the XRP Ledger (XRPL).

The initiative targets a persistent gap in institutional tokenization pilots: while minting tokens is straightforward, financing, pledging, and settling them with the same reliability as conventional holdings has proven difficult.

The Problem: Tokenized Assets That Sit Idle

Institutional real-world asset (RWA) tokenization has historically suffered from a structural failure where tokenized fund shares are issued but then parked. The ownership record, issuance rail, and settlement mechanism have typically been handled by separate, often incompatible legacy systems not designed to interface with on-chain collateral markets.

Deepening our push into capital markets, we are investing in ZILO and Licuido to add regulated transfer agency, issuance and collateral mobility to our capital markets infrastructure built on the XRPL. This comes on the heels of Aviva Investors tokenising its US Dollar Liquidity…

— Ripple (@Ripple) August 3, 2026

Ripple explicitly framed these investments as solutions to constraints where collateral sits idle, settlement times are excessive, and institutions lack a reliable path to unlock liquidity from tokenized positions. The stakes in Zilo and Licuido are designed to close these three gaps simultaneously on the XRPL.

What Zilo and Licuido Provide

Zilo manages transfer agency and fund administration, providing the regulated record of ownership that extends to tokenized share classes as funds move on-chain. Before a lender extends credit against a tokenized fund position, a legally reliable ownership register is required; Zilo supplies this layer. Its client roster, which includes Citi, Fidelity International, and State Street, provides Ripple with a direct bridge into incumbent custody and transfer agent infrastructure.

Licuido, an FCA-regulated platform, manages issuance, distribution, and execution. It allows traditional financial assets, including fund shares, to move as digital collateral through on-chain atomic settlement.

Ripple invested in two regulated capital markets firms. Today.
ZILO — digital transfer agency for asset managers. On XRPL.
Licuido — FCA-regulated issuance and collateral platform. On XRPL.
Partners already building on this infrastructure :
Aviva Investors. Franklin… https://t.co/8vOjuu87UP

— Arthur (@XrpArthur) August 4, 2026

Trades on the XRPL settle in three to five seconds. Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, RLUSD, serves as the regulated cash leg for delivery-versus-payment (DvP) transactions, ensuring that asset transfer and payment settle simultaneously rather than sequentially.

Together, the three-part stack – Zilo for regulated record-keeping, Licuido for issuance and collateral mobility, and RLUSD for the cash leg – provides institutions with a single operating model for tokenized fund assets from issuance through financing. Neither company’s financial terms were disclosed.

Nigel Khakoo, Ripple’s Senior Vice President of Trading and Markets, characterized the infrastructure role of both firms in the official press release: “ZILO and Licuido provide core capabilities that are essential to further scaling this shift: regulated digital transfer agency infrastructure and liquidity for issuance and collateral mobility.”

Building on Live Deployments, Not Pilots

These stakes are not speculative bets on unproven vendors. Ripple confirmed that both investments build on pre-existing partnerships. Licuido was already in production as the tokenization infrastructure for the Aviva Investors USD Liquidity Fund, the first tokenized fund structure approved by the Central Bank of Ireland on a public blockchain. This fund went live on XRPL on July 29, 2026.

BNY holds the underlying assets, while Komainu provides digital asset custody.

The institutional pipeline extends further. Ripple’s parallel push into institutional infrastructure includes 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 stated path toward using sgBENJI as repo collateral.

Aviva Investors. Franklin Templeton. DBS. And now ZILO and Licuido.
Ripple is building, piece by piece, the infrastructure that will allow asset managers to roll out tokenized funds at scale.
This isn’t a promise for the future. It’s a stack that’s taking shape deal by deal,… pic.twitter.com/3f81ysOe9y

— {x} (@unknowDLT) August 3, 2026

The collateral-mobility thesis Ripple is industrializing through Zilo and Licuido is the same structure that the partnership was designed to test.

On the network side, Ripple reported that the XRPL has processed more than four billion transactions since 2012 and is maintained by 120 independent validators. A major protocol upgrade, xrpld 3.3.0, targeting improvements in XRPL infrastructure and institutional finance functionality, was expected to be released shortly after the announcement.

Ripple is also one of 54 firms on a UK government task force formed to build live tokenized wholesale financial market use cases over the next 12 months, alongside Circle, Coinbase, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, and Morgan Stanley. The first target is the tokenized repo. Ripple’s expanding regulatory positioning in Europe provides additional runway for the institutional tokenization push built on XRPL.

The practical test for the Zilo and Licuido stack will be whether tokenized fund shares generate genuine secondary liquidity and serve as working collateral in live credit markets over the next 12 to 24 months – or whether they remain a more sophisticated form of the same idle token problem Ripple is explicitly trying to solve.

The post XRP News: Ripple Acquires Equity Stakes in Zilo and Licuido to Unlock Idle Tokenized Assets appeared first on Cryptonews.