Ripple and SettleMint have formed a strategic partnership to give regulated financial institutions across Asia Pacific a single system to custody, issue, and manage tokenized assets, the two companies announced from Singapore on September 1. The deal lands a day after Coincheck Group and DFNS unveiled their own tie-up to build institutional-grade custody infrastructure in Japan, marking a second major custody deal in the region within 24 hours.
The back-to-back announcements point to a broader shift across Asia’s financial sector, where banks and asset managers want to run digital assets through unified infrastructure rather than stitching together separate vendors for custody, issuance, compliance, and servicing. Both deals target the same gap, the operational complexity that has slowed institutional adoption even as regulatory frameworks mature.
One Stack Instead of Many
The Ripple partnership integrates Ripple Custody, the firm’s institutional-grade digital asset custody infrastructure, with SettleMint’s Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform (DALP). The combination lets an institution hold and manage digital assets in a regulated and compliant way across the full lifecycle through one integrated solution, covering the compliance and permissioning controls that heavily regulated institutions require.
Ripple Custody has expanded over the past year through partnerships with Securosys and Figment, an integration with Chainalysis, and the acquisition of Palisade, giving banks, fintechs, and corporates a faster route to securing digital assets, stablecoins, and real-world assets.
SettleMint’s DALP manages an asset’s entire post-launch lifecycle on a single platform, spanning issuance, compliance, custody, settlement, and servicing, and is already in use with institutions across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific. Adam Popat, CEO of SettleMint, described the importance of the partnership saying:
“Global capital markets are moving fully on-chain, and that shift only works when digital asset custody and lifecycle management operate as one system rather than two.”
Ripple and SettleMint have already commenced their offering in Asia and plan to extend it to other markets as demand develops.
Japan Builds Its Institutional Layer
A day earlier, Coincheck Group N.V. (NASDAQ: CNCK) and DFNS announced a partnership to deploy DFNS’s wallet technology through Coincheck’s Japanese subsidiary, enabling secure, institutional-grade custody for Japanese financial institutions in line with regulatory requirements. DFNS runs a wallet-as-a-service platform supporting more than 100 blockchain networks, and the companies will move toward definitive agreements as the collaboration progresses.
The deals extend a run of institutional activity underway across the region. Japan has been moving tokenization toward scale, with a megabank-led consortium studying tokenized government bonds settled 24/7, while regulatory clarity has steadily cleared the way for banks to serve as qualified custodians. Together, the Ripple and Coincheck partnerships push that trajectory into the custody layer that underpins it.
Price Shrugs Off The News
The price of XRP has not responded to the recent partnership news, with the token consolidating inside a supply zone channel formed earlier in the year. Between February 5 and June 1, price bounced between $1.30 and $1.51 on the chart, and XRP has returned to that same channel.
XRP is consolidating near $1.37 on September 1, back inside the $1.30 to $1.51 range it broke above briefly in late August before rejecting at $1.69. Source: TradingViewThe move back in follows a rally between August 17 and August 22, when XRP peaked at $1.69, its highest level of the month, before failing to hold the bullish momentum and trading back into the consolidation range. As it stands, XRP is up 39% from its August 17 low. The token would need more momentum to break above the channel, with two key levels of interest sitting at $1.60 and $1.67.
