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Standard Chartered will now hold Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin for institutional clients in Dubai, and it wants to let them trade with those tokens without ever handing them over to an exchange.
“Standard Chartered today announced that it now supports institutional custody of Ripple USD (RLUSD) issued on the XRP Ledger (XRPL), giving eligible clients access to the Bank’s digital asset custody infrastructure. The service is available through Standard Chartered Bank’s DIFC Branch, which is regulated by the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA).” the British bank announced Monday
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Custody is the unglamorous plumbing of finance: a regulated institution keeps your asset in its vault and answers for it if something goes wrong. The institution has the legal responsibility over your assets and will respond to you, but will also get permission to supervise, freeze and control your funds while they are under custody.
RLUSD is a stablecoin, a crypto token designed to always be worth $1 because it is backed by dollars, U.S. government bonds, and cash equivalents. Ripple launched it in December 2024 on Ethereum and the XRP Ledger, a public blockchain closely tied to Ripple, and the bank’s service covers the XRP Ledger version.
The bank also joined a planned integration with LMAX Group, a London-based marketplace for currencies and crypto, to make RLUSD eligible collateral on agreed LMAX products. Collateral, or margin, is the money a trader parks with a venue as a safety deposit against potential losses.
Under what Standard Chartered calls collateral mirroring, the RLUSD would stay at the bank while LMAX receives a mirrored record of its value that counts toward the client’s trades. The coins never travel to the exchange.
With mirroring, an exchange blowup would leave a trader’s collateral sitting at Standard Chartered, one of 29 banks the Financial Stability Board considers too big to fail and holds to tougher capital rules.
“Institutional clients want to participate in digital asset markets without compromising on how their assets are safeguarded,” said Waqar Chaudry, who heads digital assets in the bank’s securities services unit.
Standard Chartered has offered crypto custody in Dubai since 2024, and in July it said it became the first global systemically important bank to let institutions mint and redeem Circle’s USDC directly.
RLUSD got the Dubai regulator’s green light in June 2025. The LMAX leg is not live yet. The bank said it remains subject to final documentation, testing and regulatory approvals, and gave no date for when clients will be able to post RLUSD as margin.
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