Ripple has significantly expanded its institutional custody services by enabling staking for Ethereum (ETH) and Solana (SOL) through a partnership with staking infrastructure provider Figment. This move transforms Ripple Custody from a pure safekeeping service into a comprehensive asset servicing platform, offering large investors a way to earn staking yields without the operational complexity and risk of running their own validator infrastructure.
The new capability is specifically designed for banks, custodians, and regulated asset managers who seek staking rewards but require the operational simplicity and institutional-grade controls that keep such activities within their governance perimeter. Figment was selected for its non-custodial architecture, its service to over 1,000 institutional clients, and its focus on regulated participants. The provider is fully certified under the Node Operator Risk Standard (NORS), which audits node operators across security, resilience, and governance—a key factor for institutional due diligence.
This expansion highlights a structural difference between XRP and major proof-of-stake assets. While Ethereum and Solana can generate protocol rewards, XRP currently cannot through native mechanics. The XRP Ledger (XRPL) burns transaction fees rather than redistributing them, and validator trust is based on performance, not financial stake. RippleX developers have noted that implementing native staking on XRPL would require a sustainable rewards source and a fair distribution mechanism, constituting an economic redesign. The ledger's amendment tracker shows no staking-related feature in active development or voting, confirming it is not in a deployment phase.
Despite the lack of native staking, XRP-linked investment products are seeing strong institutional inflows. Recent weekly data from CoinShares shows XRP products attracted $63.1 million, significantly outpacing Solana ($8.2 million) and Ethereum ($5.3 million) products. Bitcoin-focused products, meanwhile, saw $264 million in outflows, indicating aggressive portfolio reallocations by investors.
Ripple's strategy is to separate roles within its institutional stack. The company's "Institutional DeFi" roadmap positions XRP and the XRPL as the high-performance, compliance-ready infrastructure for tokenized finance, bridging, and collateral flows. Meanwhile, Ethereum and Solana staking serves as a yield-generating feature to attract institutions into the custody ecosystem. The roadmap also highlights upcoming features like on-chain privacy, permissioned markets, and institutional lending.
