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This edition of the newsletter analyses how Ripple has built a vertically-integrated fintech platform combining the XRP Ledger, an EVM-compatible side-chain, RLUSD stablecoin, payment rails, and custody services to offer banks and institutions a unified solution for real-time settlement and compliant dollar liquidity. While facing challenges from regulatory uncertainty, stablecoin competition, and centralization concerns, Ripple aims to provide one of the few end-to-end, compliance-ready settlement stacks in the crypto market with XRP serving as the bridge asset across all services. We'll also share some interesting articles, portfolio updates and market highlights.
a) Security Challenges Overview
• The Trillion Dollar Security (1TS) project is an Ethereum Foundation initiative identifying six critical security areas that must be addressed for Ethereum to safely handle trillions of dollars: user experience challenges (key management, blind signing), smart contract vulnerabilities, infrastructure dependencies, consensus protocol risks, incident response gaps, and social layer governance threats.
• The report emphasizes that while Ethereum has become significantly more secure over its 10-year history, achieving the goal of billions of users holding $1000+ each and institutions storing trillion-dollar amounts requires coordinated ecosystem-wide improvements across all these security domains.
The 1TS project is an ecosystem-wide effort to upgrade Ethereum's security. This report surveys the existing security challenges facing the ecosystem.
b) Understanding Strategy from the Ground Up: The TradFi express train to crypto
• Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) operates as a Bitcoin-backed securities company that uses three primary tools—convertible bonds, preferred equity, and at-the-market share offerings—to raise capital and accumulate Bitcoin while increasing Bitcoin per share for stockholders.
• The company's success depends on Bitcoin's compound annual growth rate exceeding its cost of capital (typically 8-10%), allowing it to create value through financial engineering while offering institutional investors various risk-adjusted Bitcoin exposure products ranging from high-volatility equity to fixed-income instruments.
We deep dive into Strategy (fka MicroStrategy)-the architect of the Bitcoin treasury company model.
a) Sonic Labs
• Sonic ($) finally gets listed on Coinbase
b) Infrared Finance
• The document discusses the future of Berachain's Proof of Liquidity mechanism, arguing against the v1.3 proposal to eliminate BGT tokens and liquid staking solutions, which would harm existing dApps and protocols that have built business models around these features.
• Instead, the authors from Infrared propose incremental improvements like aligning BGT incentives with economic utility, strategic liquidity coordination for major trading pairs, and expanding grant programs rather than making radical changes driven by short-term price performance.
Introduction
Ripple has rebuilt itself into a vertically-integrated fintech platform that weaponises on the decade-old and Lindy XRP Ledger (XRPL). 5 tightly-linked products now define the entire stack: XRP Ledger, XRPL EVM Sidechain, RLUSD Stablecoin, Ripple Payments and a Custody & Prime Brokerage service. Together they aim to give banks, treasuries, institutions and DeFi builders a unified vendor for real-time settlement, compliant dollar liquidity and smart-contract functionality to build dApps.
Tech stack
At the core is the XRP Ledger, a purpose-built L1 network that finalises transactions in about 5 seconds, burns a fraction of each fee, and offers native functionality (order-book exchange, AMM pools, escrow, and NFT issuance) without relying on general-purpose smart contracts.
Alongside that, Ripple is also rolling out an EVM-compatible sidechain (XRPL EVM) that retains the ledger’s low-cost finality while exposing full Solidity programmability through an Axelar-secured bridge, and it has introduced RLUSD, a NYDFS-approved, fully collateralised USD stablecoin that mints and burns instantly on both XRPL and Ethereum.
Both these 2 chains tie directly into RippleNet’s ISO 20022 APIs, which route liquidity for banks and fintechs, and into the company’s newly acquired Hidden Road prime-broker stack, where institutional assets will be custodied, financed, and settled directly on-ledger.
XRPL: deterministic consensus (5s finality, sub-cent fees), built-in order-book DEX, AMM, escrow and NFT standards
XRPL EVM Sidechain: Cosmos-SDK + Proof-of-Authority validators, Axelar bridge; full Solidity support at XRPL speed and cost
Ripple Payments: ISO 20022/REST rails that auto-route liquidity and settle via XRP or RLUSD
RLUSD: NYDFS-approved USD stablecoin native to XRPL (and as ERC-20), instantly mint-burnable, backed 1:1 with cash + T-bills
Custody & Prime: MPC cold/warm storage plus Hidden Road’s financing and clearing stack, with post-trade events written directly to XRPL.
USP of Ripple
We see this playing out three-fold: a single vendor now offers compliant on-chain dollars (in stables), ultra-fast cross-border FX for remittances, and the most important an institutional-grade custody, and 2 execution layers all connected by the same native asset, XRP.
That coherence lets corporate treasuries eliminate pre-funded nostro accounts, gives hedge funds a post-trade venue that closes in seconds instead of days, and invites more Solidity devs to deploy familiar DeFi primitives on an infra that charges fractions of a cent in fees.
Demand and partnership
Market demand for such an architecture is growing because legacy settlement rails remain batch-based and time-zoned, stablecoins issued by non-banks increasingly need transparent reserves (PoR) and regulatory cover, and institutions entering tokenised-asset markets want a single, audit-friendly environment rather than a plethora of exchanges, custodians, and bridging services (non natives will struggle with today's crypto UX). Ripple aims to meet that demand by merging multiple intermediaries into one programmable settlement layer.
Partnerships reinforce the strategy. In payments, Ripple now services over ninety per cent of major FX corridors, has secured licences in jurisdictions such as Dubai and Singapore, and is deepening corridors between Brazil and Portugal. On the capital-markets side, the strategic Hidden Road acquisition embeds prime-broker services, while custody alliances with BDACS in Korea and Archax in the United Kingdom broaden geographical reach.
Technology collaborations with Axelar and Squid Router bring cross-chain messaging and swaps and funnel liquidity from other chains into XRP Ledger, and sustainability initiatives with Centigrade are positioning the ledger for carbon-credit tokenisation.
Concluding Thoughts
However, regulatory uncertainty persists in the US because the SEC’s litigation over whether XRP is a security is only partially resolved. The sidechain and its bridge concentrate security assumptions in a proof-of-authority validator set that must remain uncompromised. RLUSD competes against the entrenched and deep network effects of USDT (having their own chain Plasma and Stable) and USDC (Circle just IPO-ed) and will need deep liquidity to matter in trading and settlement. Finally, critics argue that because Ripple is extremely centralised, it goes against the ethos of crypto and what Bitcoin was invented in the first place.
If Ripple can navigate these challenges, particularly in scaling RLUSD, migrating Hidden Road post-trade operations on-ledger, and launching the EVM side-chain with good dApps and liquidity, it stands to offer one of the few truly end-to-end, compliance-ready settlement stacks in the market, with XRP positioned as both bridge asset and core security layer for everything that moves across it.
*Disclosure: The information provided on this newsletter is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute professional nor investment advice.
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