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According to Reece Merrick, Ripple's senior executive officer/managing director for Middle East and Africa, $XRP is emerging as the backbone for real-world financial infrastructure.
Citing the recently updated $XRP Ledger Institutional DeFi road map, which details how $XRP Ledger is evolving into a daily use layer for institutions, with $XRP powering settlement, FX, collateral and on-chain credit, Merrick noted that the foundation is set with the next wave already here.
$XRP is emerging as the backbone for real-world financial infrastructure.
— Reece Merrick (@reece_merrick) February 6, 2026
Take a look at the Institutional DeFi roadmap below. It lays out exactly how the $XRP Ledger is evolving into a daily use layer for institutions, with $XRP powering settlement, FX, collateral, and on-chain…
This week, RippleX revealed the latest institutional DeFi update, highlighting where the road map is headed next.
Native on-chain privacy, permissioned markets and institutional lending are set to go live in the coming months, with the focus areas in 2026 being lending, privacy and permissioned on-chain markets.
Features such as the MPT, Permissioned Domains, Lending Protocol, Confidential Transfers are expected to scale use cases for tokenized assets, FX and on-chain credit. Meanwhile Credentials, Token Escrow and Batch Transactions will bring about use cases in compliance, enhancing $XRP's utility in governance and reserve box.
Permissioned DEX, Permissioned Domains, Credentials with $XRP as the bridge asset are expected to enhance $XRP's utility in auto-bridging, fee burns, reserve requirements, settlement and liquidity provision.
Native on-ledger credit markets through the Lending Protocol will allow $XRP to both be borrowed and lent. It is also the default bridge asset in FX flows and settlement.
$XRP price rebounds
Following a week-long massive sell-off, the crypto market is showing signs of recovery, with $XRP now trading in the green. According to Santiment, $XRP rebounded as much as 25% from a low of $1.11 on Feb. 6 to reach $1.55.
At the time of writing, $XRP had slightly retreated, but was up 9% in the last 24 hours to $1.41 and down 18% weekly.
According to Santiment, panic sellers might have stopped to notice the massive activity on $XRP Ledger, with unique addresses suddenly skyrocketing to 78,727 in just one eight-hour candle (the highest in six months).
Obvious whale accumulation also occurred during this dip, with 1,389 separate $100,000 whale transactions, which is the highest in four months. Santiment noted both as major signals of a price reversal.