Ripple has teamed up with Clearpool and Cicada Partners to introduce real-world institutional lending capabilities on the XRP Ledger (XRPL). The collaboration aims to create on-chain credit markets that fund actual business needs rather than relying on typical decentralized finance yield strategies.
The partners highlight a longstanding issue in DeFi: the vast majority of yields—estimated around 98 percent—stem from circular market activities such as looping, arbitrage, basis trades, points programs, and liquidity mining.
These mechanisms rarely support productive economic activity, which has kept many institutional investors on the sidelines.
At the same time, on-chain activity is expanding.
Stablecoin transaction volumes surpassed $27 trillion in the prior year, increasingly driven by fintech firms and payment companies seeking working capital. Tokenized private credit has also grown beyond $10 billion.
The new initiative seeks to bridge this gap by delivering sustainable yields backed by genuine commercial operations.
Under the arrangement, each participant fills a complementary role.
Clearpool, which has arranged more than $930 million (and in some reports over $950 million) in institutional loans since 2021, is developing the technical credit layer.
It will use XRPL’s native Lending Protocol (XLS-66) and Single Asset Vaults (XLS-65).
These features enable a curator model in which independent risk managers can run isolated credit markets with predefined parameters.
Because the protocols sit at the ledger level, they avoid reliance on external smart contracts and associated risks.
Cicada Partners will handle credit origination, underwriting, servicing, covenant setting, and ongoing borrower monitoring.
The firm brings experience underwriting more than $860 million in credit and will serve as both general partner of the fund and manager of the credit pools.
Borrowers are expected to include fintech companies, payment processors, and crypto service providers that use stablecoins for genuine working-capital purposes.
Ripple will join as a limited partner in the credit fund on equal terms with other institutional investors.
It will not provide any special guarantee or first-loss protection.
Loans will be denominated in RLUSD, Ripple’s New York Department of Financial Services-regulated, BNY-custodied stablecoin.
This structure is intended to create demand for RLUSD while routing activity through XRPL, where XRP continues to serve for transaction fees and required reserves.XRPL’s existing compliance tools—Permissioned Domains, Credentials, and Clawback—support institutional requirements by allowing vetted participation and asset controls.
The protocol itself does not impose fixed application-level fees; economics are determined by the parties involved.
Clearpool is currently building and testing the integration on the XRPL Devnet, with a full technical demonstration of pool creation, borrowing, and repayment planned.
The underlying XLS-65 and XLS-66 amendments remain subject to community voting before mainnet activation.
Once live, the partners describe the deployment as one of the more significant institutional lending efforts on the ledger to date and a foundation for additional credit activity.
By combining credit infrastructure, specialized underwriting, and native ledger capabilities, the three organizations intend to position XRPL as a full financial settlement and credit layer capable of supporting real-world institutional finance.