Ripple has taken a significant leap forward in its institutional custody offerings by enabling staking for Ethereum and Solana. This strategic expansion moves Ripple’s services beyond mere safekeeping, incorporating the asset servicing features that large investors now routinely expect. Through a collaboration with Figment, a leading staking infrastructure provider, Ripple Custody clients can now tap into the yield potential of major proof-of-stake networks without the burdensome task of setting up and managing validator infrastructure themselves.
This new capability offers a compelling blend of operational simplicity and robust institutional controls. It’s specifically designed for financial powerhouses like banks, traditional custodians, and regulated asset managers who are eager to earn staking yield but prefer to keep staking operations firmly within their established governance and compliance frameworks.
Bridging the Yield Gap: ETH, SOL, and XRP
The introduction of Ethereum and Solana staking also highlights a fundamental difference between these assets and XRP, which institutions often hold in parallel. Ethereum and Solana, as proof-of-stake networks, are inherently designed to generate protocol rewards through staking. XRP, on the other hand, does not currently offer this native yield mechanism. For custody clients who often benchmark crypto servicing against familiar concepts, such as securities lending revenue or cash yields in traditional finance, this distinction is crucial.
The absence of native staking rewards for XRP at the protocol level can make a custody menu feel incomplete in a market where staking yield is increasingly considered a baseline expectation for proof-of-stake assets. While a platform offering only XRP can securely store assets, facilitate transfers, and provide reporting, it cannot offer a recurring on-chain yield program through XRP’s core mechanics.
Figment’s Role in Institutional-Grade Staking
Ripple’s decision to partner with Figment underscores the priorities institutions have when it comes to staking. These include:
- Separation of duties: Clear distinctions between asset control and infrastructure operation.
- Operational assurance: Reliable performance and uptime.
- An auditable framework: Transparency and accountability for regulatory scrutiny.
Figment was chosen for its impressive track record, serving over 1,000 institutional clients, its non-custodial architecture, and its unwavering focus on regulated participants. This non-custodial approach is particularly important, as many institutional buyers prefer custody and validator operations to remain distinct functions. They demand clear lines of accountability regarding who controls assets, who manages infrastructure, and how risks are monitored.
Staking also introduces a unique type of operational risk that traditional custody clients understand immediately. Validator performance requirements create potential failure points, and the consequences of slashing, where staked assets can be partially lost due to poor validator performance, can be challenging to explain if governance and control standards are unclear.
For regulated firms, the question is often less “can we earn rewards” and more “can we earn rewards in a way that survives compliance review and audit scrutiny.”
Figment has proactively built trust signals designed for institutional due diligence. This includes full certification under the Node Operator Risk Standard (NORS), which rigorously audits node operators across critical areas like security, resilience, and governance. These categories align closely with the due diligence checklists that shape procurement decisions in the highly regulated financial sector.
Ultimately, Ripple’s integration aims to transform staking from a complex infrastructure project into a streamlined custody feature that behaves like a workflow. This positioning reflects how the broader custody market has evolved, with institutions increasingly seeking to consolidate services and reduce multi-vendor sprawl. They prefer services bundled under a controlled operating model, complete with integrated reporting and clear accountability.
XRP Ledger’s Staking Journey: Discussions Not Deployment
While Ethereum and Solana staking are now a reality for Ripple Custody clients, the XRP Ledger (XRPL) ecosystem is still in the exploration phase regarding what native staking could look like. These ongoing discussions point to fundamental economic constraints, rather than simple cosmetic adjustments.
RippleX developers have outlined two key requirements for any native staking design on XRPL: a sustainable source for rewards and a fair distribution mechanism. It's worth noting that XRPL’s long-standing design burns transaction fees instead of redistributing them. Furthermore, validator trust on the XRPL is earned through proven performance, not through a financial stake. This implies that implementing native staking would necessitate a significant economic redesign of the ledger, not merely a straightforward upgrade to enable rewards.
Adding to this, the XRPL development pipeline’s known amendments tracker currently shows no staking-related amendment in active development or voting. While this does not preclude future work, it clearly indicates that XRP-native staking is not in an active deployment phase. For institutional custody clients, this distinction is highly practical: Ethereum and Solana yield is available, measurable, and operational today, while XRP-native staking remains a discussion with unresolved economic implications.
XRP Inflows Remain Robust Despite Staking Differences
Despite XRP’s current lack of native staking, its investment products are experiencing strong inflows. Recent weekly data from CoinShares indicated that XRP-linked investment products attracted an impressive $63.1 million in a single week. During the same period, Solana products saw $8.2 million in inflows, and Ethereum products drew $5.3 million. Meanwhile, Bitcoin-focused products experienced a significant negative sentiment, with $264 million in outflows.
These figures suggest aggressive reallocations within the crypto market, with investors actively trading and reshaping their exposures in response to price movements, rather than a simple accumulation trend. The flow data reinforces a point that institutional custody buyers often grasp quickly: a token can attract substantial institutional allocations through investment products, even if it lacks certain servicing features, such as staking, that committees increasingly expect from proof-of-stake assets. Essentially, demand for XRP as an asset and the completeness of XRP’s product features are distinct considerations.
Ripple’s Multi-Asset Strategy: XRP as Infrastructure, Not Income
In response to these market dynamics, Ripple’s strategy involves segmenting roles within its institutional stack. The company has made it clear that adding staking for other networks is not intended to diminish XRP’s strategic importance. Instead, Ripple’s recent “Institutional DeFi” roadmap positions the XRPL as a high-performance blockchain tailored for tokenized finance, complete with compliance tooling and programmability specifically designed for regulated use cases.
In this framework, Ripple describes XRP’s role as spanning reserve requirements, powering transaction fees (which burn XRP, contributing to its deflationary mechanism), and facilitating auto-bridging in foreign exchange and lending flows. The roadmap also highlights upcoming features such as on-chain privacy, permissioned markets, and institutional lending, all slated to go live in the coming months. This framing positions XRP primarily as a critical piece of infrastructure, rather than an income-generating asset.
This vision supports a comprehensive multi-asset custody approach. Institutions can now confidently earn yield on their Ethereum and Solana holdings within a controlled, compliant custody workflow, while simultaneously leveraging XRPL rails for other compliant on-chain activities. In this integrated model, yield generation on other assets serves as a powerful incentive to bring institutions into Ripple’s custody perimeter. The XRPL is positioned as the preferred environment for future on-chain activity, operating under compliance-forward constraints, with XRP serving as the essential connective asset for bridging, collateral flows, and network fees.
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