Ripple Expands XRP Ledger Infrastructure as Monica Long Declares Pilot Phase Over
- Ripple President Monica Long said institutional capital markets have moved from pilot programs into live production on the XRP Ledger.
- The comments came alongside Ripple’s strategic investments in transfer-agency firm ZILO and tokenization platform Licuido.
- The deals follow Aviva Investors tokenizing its U.S. Dollar Liquidity Fund on the XRP Ledger.
Ripple’s president says the industry has crossed a line it spent years approaching. “The veritable light switch has flipped, from bank pilots to production, from issuing tokenized assets to actually using them, “Monica Long wrote on X Monday, tying the comment to two new strategic investments the company announced the same day.
What Ripple Actually Bought
Ripple took equity stakes in ZILO, a UK-based transfer-agency and fund-administration provider whose existing clients include State Street and Fidelity International, and Licuido, a tokenization platform regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority. Ripple’s own announcement described the deals as adding regulated transfer agency, digital issuance, and collateral mobility to its institutional infrastructure on the XRP Ledger.
The distinction matters more than it sounds. Minting a tokenized asset has become routine across the industry. What has consistently stalled institutional adoption is everything after minting: keeping accurate records of who owns which fund shares, letting institutions pledge those shares as collateral without selling them, and settling trades with the same reliability as a conventional custody account. ZILO and Licuido are aimed squarely at that gap rather than at the tokenization step itself.
Neither investment is designed to drive direct XRP demand. Fund trades under this structure settle in RLUSD, Ripple’s dollar-backed stablecoin, with XRP used only to cover the ledger’s network fee, currently a fraction of a cent per transaction.
Why the Timing Lines Up With Aviva
The announcement follows Aviva Investors tokenizing its U.S. Dollar Liquidity Fund on the XRP Ledger, a live deployment and not a pilot. Ripple has also pointed to Franklin Templeton and DBS as institutions running tokenized fund structures on the network at scale.
Tokenized real-world assets on the XRP Ledger currently total roughly $368 million, a figure that ranks the network around 11th globally by that measure, well behind leaders like Ethereum. Long’s argument is essentially that the infrastructure gap, not investor appetite, has been the limiting factor, and that ZILO and Licuido close enough of that gap to matter. Whether the tokenized-asset total actually accelerates from here is the real test of that claim.
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