For you, what were the contributing factors behind the successful year that led to this award? 
We’ve seen traditional finance lean further into blockchain and digital assets as real-world use cases move to the foreground and industry players gain a better understanding of the technology. It’s also been a strong year for fiat-backed stablecoins—a common entry point into DeFi for TradFi institutions. A number of regions have enacted progressive regulatory regimes to bolster digital asset innovation, and crypto ETF approvals in the US signal an understanding of the value of digital assets despite the historically challenging regulatory environment.
Suffice to say, both retail and institutional demand for digital assets is rising rapidly, with estimates that 10% of the world’s assets will be tokenised by 2030. Ripple supports this momentum by providing top-tier global banks with secure, agile digital asset custody infrastructure built to scale alongside evolving business strategies. Ripple Custody allows financial institutions to safely offer new services, such as tokenisation and crossborder payments, ensuring compliance and security while enabling new revenue models for retail clients.
Could you outline some of the main achievements and milestones from the year?
We started the year by announcing the acquisition of Standard Custody and Trust which further strengthens Ripple’s portfolio of regulatory licenses, underscoring our commitment to providing trusted, compliance-forward solutions. We’ve also broadened access to digital asset use cases by launching new functionality and features to Ripple Custody that support crypto businesses.
This includes transaction screening service integration, HSM capabilities, XRP Ledger integration for real-world asset tokenisation, pre-configured policy frameworks, and improvements to the Ripple Custody platform’s usability and user interface. Our customers also have full autonomy over deployment and flexibility with key management to accommodate new and existing digital asset use cases.
Our partnership with Archax aims to bring hundreds of millions of dollars of tokenised real-world assets onto the XRP Ledger, including access to abrdn’s £3.8 billion US dollar Liquidity Fund (Lux) money market fund in tokenised form. Archax has already begun working with financial institutions to tokenise financial assets like equities, debt instruments, and money market funds.
This move will unlock operational cost savings and settlement efficiencies by deploying capital markets infrastructure on the XRP Ledger. And finally, just recently we announced the launch of our enterprise-grade, USD denominated stablecoin Ripple USD(RLUSD), which will be widely available via our global exchange partners. This was a major milestone for the business. It’s one of a few stablecoins issued under a New York Limited Purpose Trust, and is purpose built for payments, with trust, utility, and compliance at its core.
How do you plan to build on this success going into the rest of the year and beyond?
There is global momentum for tokenisation of real-world assets as the efficiency gains and revenue opportunities that blockchain affords become impossible for finance leaders to ignore. It’s transforming how financial markets operate.
Representing assets on the blockchain brings the core benefits of crypto to financial instruments: global, near-instant settlements, increased trust and transparency, the ability to bypass cumbersome intermediaries and reduced costs. The XRP Ledger’s battle-tested reliability and comprehensive features make it the ideal blockchain to support this next phase of DeFi.
The leading Italian banking group, Intesa Sanpaolo is just one example of an institution leveraging Ripple Custody to provide clients access to trade and manage digital assets. Ripple will continue to build innovative solutions that allow institutions to remain competitive by tapping into the booming digital asset ecosystem. Our cross-border payments solution paired with years of experience working at the intersection of crypto and finance makes us an expert partner to ensure institutions can properly execute on their digital asset strategy in 2025 and beyond.