Ripple, the blockchain payments company behind the XRP Ledger, and SettleMint, a blockchain development platform, have announced a strategic partnership aimed at delivering digital asset custody and tokenization infrastructure to banks and financial institutions across the Asia Pacific region. The agreement positions both firms to capture growing institutional demand for regulated digital asset services at a time when governments across the region are accelerating their own frameworks for tokenized securities and central bank digital currencies. Scrutiny of the broader crypto token market continues to intensify globally, making compliance-ready infrastructure a key competitive differentiator for institutional vendors.
According to a PR Newswire release detailing the arrangement, the partnership combines Ripple’s custody technology and its Ripple USD stablecoin with SettleMint’s low-code blockchain development platform, enabling financial institutions to build, deploy, and manage tokenized asset products with significantly reduced development overhead. The companies say their combined offering is designed specifically to meet the compliance and operational requirements of regulated entities in markets such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and Australia.
Tokenization Demand Accelerates Across the Region
Asia Pacific has emerged as one of the most active regions globally for the tokenization of real-world assets. Regulatory bodies in Singapore and Hong Kong have both published formal frameworks encouraging the issuance of tokenized bonds, funds, and structured products on distributed ledger infrastructure. Industry estimates suggest the market for tokenized assets in the region could reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade as adoption matures beyond pilot programs into live institutional deployment.
SettleMint’s platform is already in use across more than 35 countries, and the company says that demand from financial services clients in Asia has grown substantially over the past two years. By integrating Ripple’s custody capabilities, SettleMint can now offer clients a more complete end-to-end stack that covers asset issuance, secure custody, and settlement. The partnership is structured to allow institutions to deploy tokenized products across multiple asset classes, including fixed income instruments, real estate-backed tokens, and fund units, without needing to build proprietary blockchain infrastructure from scratch.
Ripple’s custody offering, which is already licensed in multiple jurisdictions including New York under a BitLicense, provides the regulated underpinning that institutional clients require before committing to live deployments. The inclusion of Ripple USD, the company’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, also enables on-chain settlement, reducing counterparty exposure and shortening settlement cycles compared with traditional post-trade processes.
Strategic Positioning in a Competitive Institutional Market
The announcement reflects a broader shift in how blockchain infrastructure companies are approaching institutional markets. Rather than competing head-to-head for retail crypto volumes, firms like Ripple and SettleMint are increasingly focused on the back-office transformation of traditional finance, where the total addressable market is considerably larger and regulatory relationships are a meaningful moat. The partnership model also mirrors moves by competing consortia in Europe and North America, where custody providers, platform developers, and settlement networks have begun bundling services to reduce the integration burden on bank technology teams.
For Ripple, the Asia Pacific partnership with SettleMint extends a strategy that has seen the company pursue regulatory approvals and commercial partnerships across Singapore, Japan, and Australia in recent years. The company has previously disclosed that the majority of its payment volume flows through corridors in Asia, making the region central to its long-term commercial thesis. Adding tokenization and custody to its institutional product suite allows Ripple to deepen its relationships with clients who are already using its payment rails, and to cross-sell higher-margin infrastructure services. Questions about the broader regulatory environment for digital assets remain a consideration, particularly as discussions around crypto platform accountability continue to shape policy in the United States and elsewhere.
SettleMint, which raised a Series A funding round in 2023 and has expanded its commercial footprint into the Middle East and Southeast Asia, stands to benefit from Ripple’s established institutional network and its credentialed custody offering. The two companies have not disclosed the financial terms of the partnership, but industry analysts expect that revenue-sharing arrangements tied to platform usage and assets under custody will form the basis of the commercial structure. Both firms indicated they expect the first joint client deployments in Asia Pacific to be announced before the end of 2025.