Ripple Backs 2 UK Firms to Grow XRPL: What Does XRP Actually Get?

Ripple has bought stakes in two small UK companies, ZILO and Licuido. Both add pieces the XRP Ledger (XRPL) needs before big funds will use it.

Ripple did not say what it paid. The deals land five days after Aviva Investors put a fund on XRPL as a token.

What Ripple Bought With the ZILO and Licuido Investment

ZILO is a London firm started in 2020. It sells software that tracks who owns what inside a fund. That record is the fund’s official register. That register matters. No bank lends against a fund token unless it trusts the ownership record.

ZILO’s client list says a lot. State Street picked ZILO to run its UK fund register business, then invested in the company. Citi and Fidelity International use it too. Ripple is now a shareholder alongside a global custody bank.

Licuido handles the next step. It turns fund shares into tokens on XRPL. It also runs a marketplace. There, a fund can borrow cash against its tokens instead of selling them.

One detail is worth flagging. Licuido Markets is not licensed by the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) itself. It works under the license of another firm, Sapeno Partners LLP.

Together, the two fix a real problem. Tokenized funds mostly sit still. Roughly $16 billion is parked in tokenized Treasury and money market funds, according to RWA.xyz. BeInCrypto Intelligence found most of that tokenized value idle.

“Tokenization of assets is only the starting point: the real value lies in what can be done with a token, including buying, selling, and settling trades instantly, or using it as collateral to borrow, lend, or post margin,” Nigel Khakoo, a senior vice president at Ripple, said tokenizing is only step one.

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Where XRP Fits, and Where It Does Not

Here is the part XRP holders care about. These trades will settle in RLUSD, Ripple’s dollar stablecoin. Not in XRP. Ripple has spent the year pushing RLUSD into institutions.

XRP has a much smaller job. It pays the network fee. That fee is 0.00001 XRP, or about one-thousandth of a cent. Nobody collects it. The ledger destroys it.

Now look at the total. XRP launched with 100 billion tokens. Today there are 99.986 billion. So 14 years and more than 4 billion transactions have burned about 14.4 million XRP. That is roughly $15 million.

That is every fee the ledger has ever earned. Hold it next to the price. XRP trades near $1.07, down 1.25% today and about 63% in a year. Its market value is close to $66.5 billion. The adoption and price gap keeps growing.

A coming change could shrink XRP’s job again. A sponsored fees upgrade would let banks pay fees for their users.

What to Watch Next

Aviva proved the setup works. Ireland’s central bank approved the token. Bank of New York Mellon still holds the real assets. But Aviva Investors runs £246 billion. One share class is a toe in the water.

Watch how much gets issued, not how many deals get announced. Ripple’s release counted 120 XRPL validators. Aviva said 130-plus, five days earlier. Ripple is reusing old copy.

Ledger growth only reaches XRP if trades start settling in XRP.