Ripple CEO Ends Speculation on What's Ahead for XRP Ledger

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has defined the next stage of $XRP Ledger (XRPL) development. On air on the Wall Street show, the head of the company stated that native credit infrastructure and on-chain yield tools for institutional capital are being added to cross-border settlements and the buy-and-hold strategy.

The plan outlined by Garlinghouse is being implemented against the backdrop of the Evernorth Holdings fund's listing on Nasdaq under the ticker XRPN, to which Ripple allocated 127 million $XRP tokens.

According to the CEO's statement, the goal of the partnership is to deploy on-chain and off-chain products capable of making liquidity work.

The yield-generation vector outlined by the head of Ripple already relies on the existing hybrid CeDeFi architecture. The Doppler Finance platform has accumulated $150 million from 14,000 depositors in vaults for $XRP and the $RLUSD stablecoin. The $XRP vault accounts for $125 million (~90 million tokens).

Using delta-neutral strategies, arbitrage, and spot-perp basis trading, Doppler provides the very yield that Garlinghouse spoke about for the Evernorth treasury, the Japanese conglomerate SBI, and large exchange wallets. Additional flows come through the earnXRP gateways on the Flare network and the ledger's own native AMM.

What this requires (besides Ripple's money)

First, reach an agreement with the validators. The credit market announced by Garlinghouse technically depends on two code updates that are currently being voted on by the network. The first amendment, XLS-65, is meant to launch single-asset liquidity pools ($XRP-only or $RLUSD-only), which will protect large funds from impermanent loss risks.

The second, XLS-66, activates the very mechanism for issuing fixed-term loans. As of mid-October 2026, 50–55% of validators support this key amendment. To launch, the code must stay above the 80% threshold for two weeks.

Second, embed Wall Street rules into the blockchain. The ledger's unique capabilities that the CEO spoke about are tied to strict compliance in the XLS-66 protocol. To spare institutions the risks of anonymous DeFi, underwriting and borrower assessment have been moved off-chain and will be conducted by licensed institutions.

At the same time, capital safety will be backed by a "first-loss" mechanism, and KYC/AML verification will be handled by the native layer of domain verification and digital mandates.

Third, deploy the accompanying software, and this base is already live on mainnet. The Permission Delegation and Atomic Batch features allow funds to distribute account access rights without handing over private keys, and the MPT standard is already used for tokenizing real-world assets (RWA) in tandem with Ripple's USD stablecoin.

Evernorth, Doppler, Clearpool, and Cicada have announced their intention to roll out native lending immediately after its activation in Q4 2026.