Ripple is stepping up its push into Brazil, Latin America’s largest economy, announcing plans to deepen its footprint, roll out custody services locally, and apply for a key regulatory license under Brazil’s new virtual-asset framework.
The company says it will seek a Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) license from the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB), positioning itself to operate fully under the country’s emerging rules. Ripple also claims it is now the only provider in the region able to offer a full suite of institutional services — from cross-border payments and digital-asset custody to prime brokerage and treasury management.
“Latin America has always been a priority market for Ripple — not just for the size of the opportunity but also because Brazil has developed one of the most advanced and forward-thinking financial ecosystems worldwide,” Monica Long, Ripple’s president, said. She added that years of work on licensing, trust-building, and infrastructure have prepared the firm to serve regulated institutions across the region.
Local collaborations are already in motion. Ripple highlighted partnerships with Brazil-based institutions including Banco Genial, Nomad, and Braza Bank, which are using its technology to tackle liquidity and payments challenges.
A major part of the expansion is Ripple Custody, which the firm will launch in Brazil. Built on Ripple’s 2023 acquisition of Metaco, Ripple Custody is positioned as an institutional-grade custody solution offering bank-level security, real-time compliance tooling, flexible deployment options, and support for multiple hardware security module (HSM) vendors. The service integrates Chainalysis and Elliptic for transaction monitoring and also enables institutional staking across Proof-of-Stake networks.
Real-world asset tokenization is already being tested on Ripple’s rails. Brazil-based CRX — a tokenization specialist — is reportedly using the XRP Ledger (XRPL) and Ripple Custody to issue and manage tokenized real-world assets, with roughly $100 million settled on-chain so far. Meanwhile, Justoken, which has tokenized over $1.7 billion on the XRPL, plans to use Ripple Custody to build institutional infrastructure for tokenizing natural-resource assets across Latin America.
On the stablecoin front, Ripple’s RLUSD is gaining traction in the region as institutions look for regulated digital-dollar solutions. Ripple said RLUSD is being adopted by major local exchanges and fintechs including Mercado Bitcoin, Foxbit, Ripio, and Attrus.
Market snapshot: at the time of writing XRP was trading at $1.52, up about 7% over the past week and roughly 1% in the last 24 hours.
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