Ripple Labs and SettleMint have formed a strategic partnership that plugs Ripple Custody into SettleMint’s Digital Asset Lifecycle Platform, or DALP, giving regulated financial institutions a single system to custody, issue and manage tokenized assets across their full lifecycle. Announced from Singapore, the offering has already commenced in Asia, with plans to extend it to other markets as institutional demand develops, and reaches beyond banks to market infrastructure operators and sovereign entities by combining compliance, settlement and servicing with custody and issuance. Fiona Murray, Ripple’s managing director for Asia Pacific, said regional institutions want to do more with digital assets without stitching together separate solutions for custody, issuance and governance, while SettleMint Chief Executive Adam Popat said global capital markets’ shift on-chain only works when custody and lifecycle management operate as one system. Ripple Custody provides institutional storage and security using hardware security modules and multi-party computation, with FIPS 140-2 Level 4, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II credentials, and already serves South Korea-based BDACS; DALP covers design, issuance, compliance, permissioning, settlement and post-issuance servicing and runs in production and pre-production deployments across North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia Pacific. Ripple has assembled custody through partnerships with Securosys, Figment and Chainalysis, the November 2025 acquisition of Palisade for MPC-based key sharding and multi-chain support, and cumulative crypto-infrastructure M&A and corporate venture spending of about $4 billion; the companies also cite a Boston Consulting Group May 2026 report projecting tokenized real-world assets could reach $88 trillion by 2035 and warning that banks failing to adapt could see profits fall by as much as 30%. The release names RLUSD and XRP as assets underpinning Ripple’s solutions, alongside a March RLUSD pilot in Singapore’s central bank sandbox with Unloq and an XRP Ledger cross-border pilot with JPMorgan, Mastercard and Ondo Finance that settled tokenized U.S. Treasuries in under five seconds, while SettleMint’s earlier SBI Digital Markets memorandum and Asia-Pacific regulatory advances remain part of the regional context.