Tokenizing an asset has stopped being the hard part of digital finance infrastructure; making that token useful as collateral is the part still getting built, and Ripple’s newest investments target exactly that gap. On August 3, Ripple announced strategic equity investments in two UK-regulated firms, ZILO and Licuido, converting existing commercial partnerships into ownership stakes aimed at completing a full institutional capital markets stack on the XRP Ledger.
Licuido, an FCA-regulated platform, handles the issuance, distribution, and execution side of tokenization, letting traditional financial assets such as fund shares move as digital collateral through on-chain atomic settlement. ZILO supplies the transfer agency and fund administration layer, the record-keeping infrastructure asset managers need to track who owns a tokenized share class after it moves. Ripple’s Nigel Khakoo, SVP of Trading and Markets, put the logic plainly: “the real value lies in what can be done with a token,” not in the act of minting it, whether that is buying, selling, settling trades instantly, or pledging it as collateral.
The original insight here is about sequencing. Most institutional tokenization pilots have stalled not because minting tokens is hard but because financing, pledging, and settling them with the same reliability as a conventional holding is. By buying into the regulated infrastructure layer rather than building it from scratch, Ripple is betting that owning the plumbing around collateral mobility, not the ledger itself, is what will unlock institutional volume. It is the same problem that atomic settlement between tokenized deposits and stablecoins was built to solve, as Partior and OpenAssets demonstrated with their own proof of concept earlier this month, and it signals that the next competitive battle in digital assets is being fought over settlement rails, not token issuance.
Source: Ripple
