Ripple has enabled the staking of Ethereum and Solana within its institutional custody business, expanding beyond custody to include asset management features that large investors increasingly view as standard.
The new capability, delivered through a partnership with staking infrastructure provider Figment, allows Ripple Custody customers to offer staking on major proof-of-stake networks without setting up validator infrastructure.
This service offers operational simplicity with institutional controls, a combination aimed at banks, custodians and regulated asset managers who want to stake on yield but do not want staking operations to fall outside their governance scope.
The move also highlights a structural difference between XRP and the proof-of-stake assets that institutions typically hold alongside it. Ethereum and Solana can generate protocol rewards. XRP cannot, at least not today.
For custodial clients who compare crypto services to familiar concepts like securities lending revenue or cash yields, this gap is significant.
Figment’s role in achieving institutional quality staking
Ripple’s choice of Figment indicates institutions’ priorities when requesting staking: segregation of duties, operational assurance, and auditable framework.
Figment says Ripple selected it for its experience serving more than 1,000 institutional clients, its non-custodial architecture, and its focus on regulated participants.
This architecture is important in practice because many institutional buyers prefer that custody and validation operations remain separate functions. They want clear lines on who controls assets, who manages infrastructure and how risks are monitored.
Staking also carries a type of operational risk that traditional custody clients immediately recognize. Validator performance requirements introduce failure modes, and results related to reductions can be difficult to explain if governance and control standards are not clear.
For regulated companies, the question is often less “can we earn rewards” and more “can we earn rewards in a way that withstands compliance checks and scrutiny.”
Figment also emphasized trust signals built for institutional due diligence, including full certification under the Node Operator Risk Standard (NORS), which audits node operators for security, resilience and governance.
These categories closely align with the due diligence checklists that typically shape purchasing decisions in the regulated financial industry.
The Ripple integration aims to transform staking into a custody feature that behaves like a workflow and not an infrastructure project.
This positioning corresponds to the evolution of the conservation market. Institutions are increasingly trying to reduce the proliferation of multiple providers. They want services bundled under a controlled operating model, with reporting and accountability.
XRP does not offer protocol staking and the XRPL staking debate is not at the deployment stage
The addition of Ethereum and Solana staking also highlights what XRP does not provide: protocol-level staking rewards.
This omission becomes tangible at the guard level. A platform that only offers XRP can store assets, support transfers, and provide reporting, but it cannot offer an on-chain recurring yield program through XRP’s native mechanisms.
In an environment where staking yield is treated as a baseline expectation for proof-of-stake assets, this can leave a custodial menu incomplete.
Meanwhile, Ripple’s ecosystem is exploring what XRP Ledger (XRPL) staking could look like, but these discussions highlight economic, not cosmetic, constraints.
RippleX developers have outlined two requirements for any native staking design on XRPL: a sustainable source of rewards and a fair distribution mechanism.
Notably, XRPL’s long-standing approach is to burn transaction fees rather than redistribute them. The trust of the validator is earned through performance rather than financial stakes.
This means that the bet would require an economic overhaul, not a simple upgrade that would activate rewards.
There is also a process signal in the XRPL development pipeline. Tracking known ledger changes currently shows no staking-related changes being developed or voted on.
This does not preclude future work. This, however, reinforces the fact that staking is not in active deployment phase on XRPL.
For institutional care clients, this distinction is practical. The performance of Ethereum and Solana exists today, is measurable today, and can be operationalized today. On the other hand, native XRP staking remains a discussion with unresolved economics.
XRP inflows are strong anyway, even as institutions alternate risks
The expansion of custodial products is underway as XRP-linked investment products see larger weekly inflows than Ethereum and Solana-linked products, according to recent weekly data.
CoinShares reported that XRP-led investment products attracted $63.1 million last week. During the same period, Solana’s products brought in $8.2 million and Ethereum’s made $5.3 million.
However, Bitcoin-focused products saw a strong pocket of negative sentiment, with $264 million in outflows for the week.
These figures show aggressive reallocations, with investors trading and reshaping their exposures as prices move, rather than a simple wave of accumulation.
The flow data highlights a point that custody buyers often come across quickly.
A token can attract institutional allocations through investment products, while lacking the service functionality that committees increasingly expect from proof-of-stake assets.
Essentially, XRP demand and XRP product completeness are separate issues.
In light of this, Ripple’s response is to separate roles within its institutional stack. XRP remains positioned as the company’s preferred in-rails connection asset, while Ethereum and Solana offer yield inside the holding boundary.
Ripple keeps XRP at the center with an institutional DeFi roadmap
Ripple has made it clear that adding stakes on other networks is not intended to diminish the importance of XRP in its strategy.
Instead, the company’s recent “Institutional DeFi” roadmap positions XRPL as a high-performance chain for tokenized finance, with compliance tools and programmability designed for regulated use cases.
Ripple describes the role of XRP covering reserve requirements, transaction fees (which burn XRP), and automatic bridging of exchange and lending flows.
The roadmap also highlights on-chain privacy, permissioned marketplaces, and institutional lending as features expected to come live in the coming months.
This framework positions XRP as infrastructure and not a revenue asset.
It also supports a multi-asset custody approach, allowing institutions to earn yield on Ethereum and Solana in a controlled custody workflow and then use the XRPL rails.
In this model, performance is a characteristic that allows institutions to be integrated into the custody perimeter. XRPL positions itself as the environment in which Ripple wants more on-chain activity to occur, subject to compliance constraints.
And XRP is touted as the connective asset for bridging, collateral flows, and fees.
