SBI Ripple Asia has signed a memorandum of understanding with Doppler Finance to explore XRP-based yield infrastructure and tokenization of real-world assets on the XRP Ledger, the companies announced on December 17.
According to information shared with CryptoSlateThe companies said they would explore collaboration on yield infrastructure for XRP, which lacks native staking, as well as RWA tokenization streams on XRPL.
The companies touted it as SBI Ripple Asia’s first partnership with a native XRPL protocol.
They have also appointed SBI Digital Markets as institutional custodian with separate custody.
Building regulated XRP yield rails for institutional adoption
According to the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Directory of Financial Institutions, SBI Digital Markets Pte. Ltd. is a capital markets services licensee which includes custody services and trading of capital market products.
It is also listed as an exempt financial advisor, which strengthens the custody and compliance framework.
The structure speaks to a broader effort to make XRP “productive” by routing it to sources of yield while keeping assets in regulated custody packaging.
In practice, this shifts the product conversation away from on-chain staking mechanisms and toward balance sheet-friendly rails: custody separation, eligibility checks, disclosures, and return flow generation and reporting.
Rox Park, head of institutions at Doppler, said companies will explore yield and tokenization infrastructure on XRPL.
An SBI Ripple Asia spokesperson described the work as expanding institutional access to on-chain products through compliance-aligned design.
The immediate market context is that XRPL’s DeFi footprint remains small compared to Ethereum-style sites, even as stablecoin and tokenization activity grows.
XRPL’s DeFi Push: Institutional Access, Early Traction, and Market Limits
According to DefiLlama’s XRPL dashboard at the time of capture,
RLUSD accounted for 78.90% of XRPL stablecoins, with DEX volume of $5.7 million over 24 hours and $35.8 million over seven days.
RWA.xyz’s XRPL page showed $212 million in distributed asset value, $239 million in represented asset value, 50 RWA, and $327 million in stable market cap (up 38% over 30 days).
It also showed $564 million in 30-day stablecoin transfer volume.
From the overall perspective of RWA.xyz, the value of assets distributed was $18.74 billion and the total value of stablecoins was $300.18 billion.
Ethereum alone has posted a total RWA value of over $12 billion and a stable market cap of $171 billion, a sizable gap that explains why a custody-led institutional coin is important to XRPL’s growth trajectory.
Since XRP is not staking natively, any “XRP yield” wrapper is ultimately dependent on external yield streams and the governance around them.
The protocol describes the expansion of CeDeFi style strategies and option-based source mining as well as other approaches.
How XRP Could Generate Yield Without Native Staking
A second avenue is tokenized cash equivalent yield, where exposure to XRP can be combined or transformed into tokenized treasuries or money market funds.
This is an area Ripple has already seeded in XRPL through partners, including tokenized cash products that can be issued and traded using RLUSD.
A third path involves credit primitives on XRPL itself, if and when they mature, including the proposed XRPL native loan primitive (XLS-66d) currently being discussed in the XRPL standards process on GitHub.
If SBI Ripple Asia and Doppler’s work progresses from exploration to product, adoption calculations can scale quickly compared to existing XRPL benchmarks.
The circulating supply stands at approximately 60.49 billion XRP and the spot price is near $1.91.
Even routing a fraction of the circulating supply into a yield envelope produces nine-figure assets under management:
| Portion of XRP in circulation routed to a “yield wrapper” | XRP Amount | Approximate AUM (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| 0.1% | ~60.49 million XRP | ~$114 million |
| 0.5% | ~302.45 million XRP | ~$572 million |
| 1.0% | ~604.91 million XRP | ~$1.14 billion |
| 2.0% | ~1.21 billion XRP | ~$2.29 billion |
| 5.0% | ~3.02 billion XRP | ~$5.72 billion |
For companies that can bundle these streams with custody, compliance, and reporting, the business incentive looks more like fee revenue than token beta.
Using a range model rather than asserting prices, an overall envelope of 50 to 150 basis points on $1.14 billion in assets under management implies approximately $5.7 to $17.1 million in annual revenue.
This is why regulated custody is not a secondary detail of the announcement.
It is the product distribution channel and the control plan that determine which investors can use it and under what disclosure regime.
Regulated Custody, Tokenization, and Revenue Argument Behind XRP’s Next Phase
The timing also intersects with tokenization predictions and payment demands that are not specific to XRPL but shape the addressable market.
According to a 2022 Ripple and BCG tokenization report (distributed via ADDX documents), tokenized RWA projections stand at $9.4 trillion by 2030 and $18.9 trillion by 2033, alongside a cited CAGR assumption of 53%.
McKinsey separately argued that tokenization in financial services is moving from pilot to scale.
On the payments side, Artemis’ October 2025 Stablecoin Update reported that stablecoin payments increased from $6.0 billion in February to $10.2 billion in August, an increase of 70%.
It is also estimated that more than $136 billion has been settled since 2023, a context that explains why tokenized cash, settlement stablecoins, and yield-producing cash equivalents are converging into a single product category.
Regulatory Rollback Still Part of the Equation
According to a Reuters report on IOSCO’s tokenization work, the securities watchdog warned that tokenization may introduce new risks or amplify existing ones, including concerns about market integrity and investor protection, even where efficiencies exist.
These concerns directly correspond to how an institutional XRP yield wrapper would be valued.
They include what token holders legally own, how redemption and settlement work when the underlying asset is off-chain, whether strategy returns are verifiable, and how liquidity asymmetries are managed when on-chain transfers may be instantaneous but off-chain service windows are not.
If the sources of return include derivatives or core strategies, the control issue becomes transparency of positions, counterparties, risk limits and liquidation cascades.
It is also a question of whether segregation in custody is associated with relationships that respond to institutional controls.
XRPL’s own roadmap provides tools that fit the “permissions and controls” thesis better than the “APY farm” model.
XRPL.org documents multipurpose tokens, which add metadata and transfer control features designed for tokenization.
It also documents Deep Freeze, which provides issuer-level controls to restrict frozen holders.
The roadmap also includes identifying information for attestations in the ledger that can support authorized flows.
These primitives are relevant if SBI Ripple Asia and Doppler aim to create yield and RWA rails that can be used by institutions requiring eligibility checks, transfer restrictions and defined issuer powers under legal agreements.
For now, the announcement commits the parties to exploration under a memorandum of understanding and names SBI Digital Markets as the anchor for custody and compliance.
The next steps in product design remain: scope of eligible investors, mix of yield sources, disclosure and attestations, token form factor, redemption mechanisms, and how ledger controls are actually used in production rather than described in documentation.
