Summary:
- Ripple has expanded its institutional custody platform with new integrations focused on security and staking.
- Partnerships with Securosys and Figment allow institutions to offer custody and staking without running their own validator infrastructure.
- Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) are now a core part of Ripple Custody's security model.
- The move is aimed at reducing operational complexity for banks and regulated financial firms entering digital assets.
- Ripple continues to build beyond payments, deepening its role in custody and post-trade crypto infrastructure.
Ripple is moving deeper into the infrastructure side of crypto for banks and large financial firms. On Monday, the company said it has expanded its institutional custody platform through new integrations with Securosys and Figment, adding both security and staking capabilities into its stack. The core idea is very simple. Many institutions want exposure to digital assets, but running validators, managing private keys at scale, and meeting strict compliance standards is a heavy lift. Ripple is trying to remove those barriers by packaging more of the technical and security layers into its custody offering. A key part of this update is the use of hardware security modules, or HSMs. These are specialized physical devices designed to protect and manage cryptographic keys - the digital secrets that control access to crypto assets. Ripple Custody now integrates directly with established HSM providers.
Ripple said it is adding hardware security modules to enable banks and custodians to deploy custody services and offer staking without necessarily operating their own validator or key-management infrastructure. That matters because staking, which involves locking crypto to help secure blockchain networks in return for rewards, typically requires technical operations that many traditional institutions are not set up to run internally. With this model, a bank could offer staking to clients while relying on integrated infrastructure rather than building everything in-house. That lowers both technical risk and time to market. Security messaging is front and center in this rollout.
Ripple Custody now supports one of the most extensive ranges of HSM providers, aiming to make compliance easier across different regulatory environments. That flexibility is important for global banks operating under multiple legal frameworks at once.
Staking Without Running the Machinery
The second piece of the update is staking integration through Figment, a well-known staking infrastructure provider.
Staking is often discussed in retail crypto circles, but for institutions it's becoming part of yield strategies tied to digital assets. The problem is operational. Running validators, handling uptime, managing slashing risks, and securing keys can introduce new layers of complexity and liability. By integrating staking directly into its custody platform, Ripple is positioning itself as a middle layer between blockchain networks and financial institutions. The institution holds assets in custody and can choose to stake them through integrated services, without directly running validator nodes.
This approach fits into a broader shift in crypto infrastructure. Specialized providers are emerging for custody, staking, compliance, and post-trade services. Ripple appears to be bundling several of those layers together under one institutional-facing platform. Ripple said the integrations are intended to reduce deployment complexity and support faster rollout of custody services for institutional clients. That speed factor matters. As regulatory clarity improves in some jurisdictions, traditional firms are under pressure not just to experiment with crypto, but to offer real products to clients.
Ripple's Bigger Institutional Play
This move also highlights how Ripple's business has evolved. While many still associate the company mainly with cross-border payments, its product set is broader today. Ripple is a financial technology company that offers crypto solutions for businesses. Ripple Payments uses blockchain to make cross-border payments faster, more transparent, and widely accessible. Ripple Custody offers customers a secure way to store and manage digital assets. Through Ripple Prime, the company offers a global, multi-asset prime brokerage for institutional customers. Ripple's stablecoin (RLUSD) and the cryptocurrency, XRP, are leveraged across these solutions to make traditional finance more efficient and enable new ways to utilize digital assets.
Custody, in particular, has become a key gateway for institutional crypto adoption. Before banks and asset managers can trade, lend, or stake digital assets, they need secure storage that meets regulatory and internal risk standards. That makes custody one of the first and most important layers of institutional crypto infrastructure.
Ripple and Securosys core background
Ripple is a US-based blockchain infrastructure company that provides payment and custody technology to financial institutions and is the issuer of the XRP token and the dollar-pegged stablecoin RLUSD, which it launched in December 2024. By adding deeper security integrations and staking, the company is signaling that it wants to be more than a payments-focused blockchain firm. It wants to be part of the back-end plumbing that regulated institutions rely on. On the other hand, Securosys SA, based in Zurich, is a global leader in cyber security, encryption, and digital identity protection. Their Swiss-built Hardware Security Modules (HSM) secure financial markets, serving over half of the Tier 1 banks worldwide. Certified to the highest standards, their on-premises and cloud HSM solutions offer secure key generation, encryption, digital signing, and post-quantum readiness for finance, healthcare, government, and other industries.
That kind of background helps bridge the gap between traditional finance security expectations and crypto-native systems. For institutions that are cautious about digital assets, seeing familiar security models integrated into blockchain custody can make the step feel less foreign. Overall, Ripple's latest update is about making crypto services look and feel closer to the systems banks already trust, while still tapping into blockchain networks under the hood. If institutions continue moving into digital assets, this kind of integrated custody and staking setup could quietly become a standard part of how the market operates.
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