Key Highlights
XRPL has entered the top tier of institutional DeFi with $1B+ monthly stablecoin volume and top-10 RWA activity.
Credentials and Deep Freeze are now live, strengthening compliance for institutions.
The upcoming native lending protocol will unlock low-cost, compliant credit markets at the protocol level.
Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are in development to balance privacy, compliance, and scalability.
With lending, compliance, programmability, and tokenization converging, XRPL is emerging as the leading chain for institutional finance.
Institutional DeFi has crossed the tipping point from pilot projects to billion-dollar volumes. Over the last year, the XRP Ledger (XRPL) has broken into the Top 10 chains for real-world assets (RWAs), reached its first $1B+ month in stablecoin volume, and cemented its role as a settlement layer trusted by both crypto-native firms and regulated financial institutions.
At the core of this evolution is XRP itself: every new feature that enhances XRPL’s institutional utility strengthens the underlying demand and use cases for the network’s native digital asset. This momentum underscores XRPL’s evolution into a leading blockchain for real-world finance. The ledger is increasingly positioned to power two of the most significant use cases in global markets today: stablecoin payments and collateral management, with tokenization providing the essential foundation. What began as an ambitious vision for regulated, on-chain finance is now rapidly becoming industry standard. The challenge ahead for the broader community is ensuring the XRPL continues to scale with the right mix of features, balancing innovation, compliance, and reliability.
This roadmap update highlights what has already gone live, what is under active validator voting, and what is coming in the months ahead. It especially emphasizes two themes shaping the next stage of XRPL’s institutional DeFi evolution: the launch of a native lending protocol and the integration of zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) for privacy with accountability.
What’s Live: Enterprise-Ready Infrastructure
XRPL’s core strengths - its native DEX, low fees, and fast settlement - have been reinforced this year through major releases.
Newly Live: Credentials, Deep Freeze and Simulate
Three recent launches significantly expand what’s possible for institutional adoption on the XRP Ledger:
Credentials - Linked to Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), credentials enable trusted issuers to attest to attributes such as KYC status, accreditation, or regulatory permissions. On their own, Credentials provide a more secure and privacy-preserving way for institutions to meet compliance requirements. But their real power comes as a foundational building block within XRPL’s broader identity stack, enabling permissioned domains, regulated DEXs, and compliant access to tokenized assets and lending markets. Credentials are less a standalone product and more a key enabling piece in assembling regulated DeFi
Deep Freeze - now live, Deep Freeze lets token issuers prevent misuse by frozen account holders. It ensures that flagged addresses cannot send or receive tokens until their trust line is unfrozen, allowing issuers to comply with sanctions and other regulatory requirements. For stablecoin issuers and RWA providers, Deep Freeze is a critical safeguard that blocks illicit transfers while maintaining transparency across payments, DEX, and AMM activity.
Simulate - A new transaction method that allows developers to “dry run” transactions before committing them to the network. Simulate provides realistic previews of how a transaction will behave under mainnet conditions—without broadcasting or affecting ledger state. This reduces risk for enterprises, improves debugging, and ensures greater reliability for high-value or complex transactions.
Together, these features strengthen XRPL’s compliance and settlement toolkit, offering critical capabilities for institutions looking to operate on-chain with confidence.
XRPL Feature Release Overview
XRPL Version 2.5.0, published in June, introduced amendments such as Batch Transactions, Permissioned DEX, Permission Delegation, Token Escrow, and AMM v1.3, alongside performance upgrades to handle higher transaction throughput. The release marked a critical step in ensuring that escrow, DEX, and liquidity mechanisms are fit for institutional purposes, including compliance-driven scenarios like stablecoin issuance and RWA settlement. Token Escrow is a key highlight, as it extends XRPL’s long-standing escrow primitive to cover all tokenized assets, including stablecoins and Multi-Purpose Tokens (MPTs). This unlocks conditional settlement for regulated assets with new options for cancellation, clawback, and compliance controls.
XRPL Version 2.6.0, released in August, delivered additional developer-facing functionality, including better visibility for Multi-Purpose Tokens (MPTs) and enriched transaction streams. This cadence of rapid releases underscores XRPL’s accelerated development cycle and maturing governance.
Alongside these upgrades, XRPL has seen several compliance-focused tools move into production. Deep Freeze now allows issuers to halt transfers from flagged accounts, vital for regulated stablecoin issuers. Permission Delegation and Clawback mechanisms extend issuer control, balancing decentralization with regulatory expectations. The introduction of Decentralized Identifiers (DID) has also laid the groundwork for identity-aware markets, paving the way for on-ledger credentialing and permissioned trading venues.
Compliance and Market Access: Credentials, Domains, and DEX
For institutions, regulatory compliance is not an optional layer, it is the gateway to adoption. XRPL’s “identity stack” has been designed to meet these expectations while preserving decentralization.
Decentralized Identifiers (DID), live on XRPL, allow users and institutions to anchor verifiable identities without centralized intermediaries.
Credentials, live on XRPL, lets trusted issuers attest to attributes such as KYC status, accreditation, or regulatory permissions, linked directly to DIDs.
Permissioned Domains, undergoing voting, allow markets to gate participation based on these credentials, creating user-controlled environments.
Permissioned DEX, undergoing voting, built on these primitives, extends XRPL’s battle-tested decentralized exchange into regulated contexts, enabling secondary markets for RWAs or FX with full AML/KYC controls.
Together, these features create a modular compliance stack. Institutions can define who may participate, ensure privacy through selective credential disclosure, and still leverage the efficiency of a decentralized, order-book-based DEX.
Tokenization and MPT: The Language of Real Assets
Tokenization remains the central enabler of XRPL’s institutional strategy. The introduction of the Multi-Purpose Token (MPT) standard, expected to go live in October, marks a step-change in how complex financial instruments can be represented on-chain. MPTs are a flexible token standard that can carry essential metadata, such as maturity dates, tranches, or transfer restrictions, without relying on complex smart contracts.
For issuers of bonds, money market funds, or structured products, MPT allows assets to be represented faithfully and traded natively on XRPL. The next phase will allow for the integration of MPTs directly into the DEX, enabling seamless trading, AMM liquidity pools, and cross-token payments. This closes the loop from issuance, to trading, to settlement, entirely at the protocol level.
Credit On-Chain: The Native Lending Protocol
The most significant near-term milestone is the launch of XRPL’s native lending protocol, scheduled for release in XRPL Version 3.0.0 later this year.
This protocol, defined in the XLS-65/66 specifications, introduces pooled lending and underwritten credit directly at the ledger level. Single-Asset Vaults (XLS-65) aggregate liquidity, issuing Vault shares that can be transferable or non-transferable depending on configuration. These vaults can be public or gated via Permissioned Domains, ensuring open participation or controlled access as required.
The Lending Protocol (XLS-66) then builds on these vaults to enable fixed-term, uncollateralized loans with pre-set amortization schedules. Loan issuance is managed through on-ledger contracts between lenders and borrowers, while underwriting and risk management remain off-chain, where institutions already have mature models. Optional on-ledger first-loss capital provides an added layer of depositor protection. While the protocol itself does not hold collateral, institutions can still structure collateralized loans through licensed third-party custodians or tri-party arrangements, combining the transparency of XRPL with the safeguards of regulated custody.
For institutions, the appeal is clear: no financial institution will turn down low cost capital if it can be sourced within KYC/AML standards. The lending protocol enables exactly that, pooling liquidity from a global base of smaller investors into institutional-sized loans while maintaining compliance. Borrowers gain access to more efficient, lower-cost funding. Lenders earn yield on otherwise idle assets. Loan managers can meet rising demand from traditional finance by tapping into the growing pool of digital asset liquidity.
Operationally, the protocol automates the entire loan lifecycle: issuance, repayment tracking, and reconciliation, directly on-ledger. This reduces back-office overhead, cuts reliance on intermediaries, and provides a tamper-proof audit trail, all while benefiting from XRPL’s consistently low fees and fast settlement.
Looking ahead, institutions are already lined up to use the protocol, and its modular design ensures that new features can be iterated on quickly as market needs evolve.
Programmability and Developer Experience
A core design principle for XRPL programmability is to extend functionality without compromising the network’s reliability and simplicity. This year, progress has been made on Extensions, which allow developers to add small, verifiable pieces of code to native features such as escrows or AMMs. This modular approach enables “Smart Escrows” with custom release conditions, without the risks associated with general-purpose smart contracts.
For projects requiring full programmability today, the XRPL EVM Sidechain is live. Powered by eXRP and bridged via Axelar, it lets Solidity developers tap into XRPL liquidity and identity features while deploying familiar EVM applications. This dual-track approach, measured programmability on mainnet and full flexibility on sidechain, preserves XRPL’s efficiency while broadening its developer base.
Privacy with Accountability: The Next Frontier for Zero-Knowledge Proofs
While zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) have been known in cryptography since the 1980s, practical blockchain-scale applications are only now reaching maturity. For financial institutions, full transparency doesn’t always work, but privacy features must still meet compliance and auditability standards. That’s why XRPL’s next major push is programmable privacy.
The XRPL community has moved beyond exploration and is now prototyping ZKP integrations with R&D and compliance teams, alongside partners such as Hidden Road. The first application is already in development: confidential Multi-Purpose Tokens (MPTs), scheduled for launch in Q1 2026. These tokens will support privacy-preserving collateral management, a critical requirement for institutional adoption of tokenized finance.
ZKPs make this possible by validating information without exposing the full dataset. That enables use cases such as:
Proving KYC compliance without revealing personal details.
Enabling auditors to verify activity while protecting counterparties’ proprietary transactions.
Supporting proof-of-reserves and liabilities without disclosing sensitive wallet data.
Allowing tokenized collateral to be deployed in lending or settlement workflows while keeping terms and positions confidential.
Beyond confidentiality, ZKPs also strengthen scalability and interoperability: succinct proofs verified on XRPL reduce strain on the base layer, and cryptographic verifiability across systems removes reliance on trusted intermediaries.
For institutions, this is the next step in making XRPL infrastructure fit for high-value markets: privacy with accountability, compliance with confidentiality. With confidential MPTs as the first milestone, XRPL is building a roadmap of privacy tools that will unlock broader institutional adoption in tokenization, credit, and settlement.
Pushing Ahead
Ripple’s institutional DeFi roadmap for the XRPL is accelerating. In the last year, we’ve moved from token standards and compliance primitives to the brink of a protocol-level lending system. Next comes integrating these building blocks: stablecoins, RWAs, lending, and compliance- into cohesive markets that institutions can use with confidence.
For validators and operators, the immediate call is to upgrade to 3.0.0 and participate in amendment voting. For developers, now is the time to test Vaults and Lending Protocol features on devnet and experiment with all outstanding amendment features including Batch Transactions, Token Escrow, and MPT issuance. For institutions, the roadmap points to a future where stablecoin FX, collateralized lending, and tokenized assets are all serviced natively on XRPL.
The north star remains unchanged: XRPL as a leading chain for institutional finance, simple, secure, and compliant. With lending, tokenization, permissioned markets, and privacy converging at the protocol layer, the foundation for the next decade of institutional blockchain finance is being built now.
