Ripple builds Brazil center for XRPL tokenization

Ripple and Brazil’s central securities depository, CSD BR, started a first-phase project on Sept. 29 to mirror ownership records for BTG Pactual investment fund shares on the XRP Ledger (XRPL). Under the initial phase, CSD BR will mirror fund-share ownership records on XRPL and use Ripple custody services while CSD BR’s own systems remain the official register for registration, deposit and settlement. Access to the mirrored ledger is limited to authorized Brazilian corporate and banking participants subject to identity and anti-money-laundering checks. Native issuance and trading on XRPL are planned for later phases after the mirroring process is validated.

Markus Infanger, a RippleX executive, estimated “about $2.7 billion” of the roughly $6.7 billion in tokenized real-world assets he counted on XRPL are held in Brazil, a concentration that represents roughly 40% of his XRPL total.

Ripple opened a Brazilian office in 2019 and has operated several commercial relationships in the country since. The company launched XRP-enabled payments with Travelex Bank in 2022 and established a payments partnership with Mercado Bitcoin in 2024 that initially focused on internal treasury transfers between Brazil and Portugal. By March 2026, Ripple expanded its institutional offering in Brazil to include payments, custody, prime brokerage and treasury management, naming Banco Genial, Braza Bank and Nomad among payments users and citing Mercado Bitcoin, Foxbit and Ripio as platforms supporting its dollar stablecoin RLUSD. Ripple has indicated plans to apply for a Brazilian virtual asset service provider license.

Other projects on XRPL in Brazil include a 2025 credit platform run by VERT that recorded lifecycle events, documentation and payments on XRPL and an associated EVM sidechain, and a pension-receivables fund that reported more than R$200 million in net assets. In July 2025 Mercado Bitcoin announced plans to tokenize more than $200 million in permissioned real-world assets on XRPL.

Regulatory changes in Brazil will affect commercial activity. Rules effective Oct. 1 bar virtual assets from settling aggregated electronic foreign-exchange flows between providers and foreign counterparties, while individual international virtual-asset transfers remain permitted.

A separate industry index ranked Brazil first for crypto adoption in 2026 and estimated $252.5 billion in Brazilian crypto activity between July 1, 2025 and June 30, 2026, while noting a 1.6% contraction in the country’s crypto economy over that period. The index measures cross-border flows, service flows, domestic peer-to-peer activity and balances rather than raw market size.

For now, CSD BR’s mirrored registry preserves the depository’s official control of securities records while placing an XRPL-based system inside existing market processes. Ripple and its local partners have not published Brazil-specific payment volumes, RLUSD circulation, or the level of ongoing institutional transactions tied to the mirrored registry. The extent of on-chain transactions and broader use of the CSD BR system will determine how these early integrations proceed.