Standard Chartered has started offering institutional custody of Ripple USD (RLUSD), Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin issued on the XRP Ledger. The bank announced the service on Oct. 12 and is running it through its branch in the Dubai International Financial Centre, which the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) regulates.
The second half of the announcement is not live yet. Standard Chartered, Ripple and LMAX Group say they are working to make RLUSD “eligible collateral for agreed LMAX Group products and solutions across trading and collateral management.” The releases from all three companies say those “agreed future capabilities remain subject to final documentation, successful testing, applicable laws and regulations, internal approvals and jurisdictional readiness.” None of them gave a launch date.
What is live today
What changes now is who holds the stablecoin. Eligible clients can keep RLUSD in a bank’s custody unit inside a DFSA-supervised branch, instead of with an exchange or a crypto-native custodian. The releases did not say which clients qualify, what the service costs, or how much RLUSD the bank holds.
What is still a plan
The planned piece is about how that custody would connect to trading. Under Standard Chartered’s “collateral mirroring” model, the value of eligible collateral would be mirrored to LMAX “without requiring the underlying RLUSD to be transferred directly to the trading venue,” the bank said. In plain terms, the bank would keep the tokens and the venue would accept their value as margin. The companies say this is meant to cut transfer-related operational risk and counterparty exposure. Neither the bank nor LMAX has published the legal or operational terms.
“Institutional clients want to participate in digital asset markets without compromising on how their assets are safeguarded or how risk is managed,” said Waqar Chaudry, Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets for securities services.
Luke Dorney, LMAX Group’s head of custody for digital assets, said the venue had agreed “to adopt Standard Chartered’s collateral mirroring model.” Jack McDonald, Ripple’s senior vice president for stablecoins, said customers want “the efficiency of a regulated stablecoin without giving up the custody standards they already trust.”
Several regulators, no single sign-off yet
The custody sits under the DFSA in Dubai. LMAX’s businesses are licensed separately: according to the company, its FX exchange is regulated by the UK’s FCA and Singapore’s MAS, and LMAX Digital by Gibraltar’s GFSC. Which LMAX entity would accept RLUSD collateral, and under which approvals, has not been disclosed.
The firms already have commercial ties. Ripple provided LMAX with $150 million in financing in January as part of plans to embed RLUSD in its infrastructure, CoinDesk reported. CoinDesk also reported last week that Standard Chartered plans to offer crypto and stablecoin custody to institutional clients in Singapore. That is a separate plan, and the Dubai launch says nothing about when it will start.
The bottom line: a regulated bank is now holding RLUSD in Dubai. Using that RLUSD as collateral at LMAX is still a plan.
Sources: Standard Chartered; Ripple; LMAX Group; CoinDesk