 
 
Ripple has applied for a national trust bank charter and taken other concrete steps to plug traditional banking into tokenized payments.
Those moves aim to provide custody, stablecoin issuance, and settlement rails under a regulated charter. Ripple’s filings, banking-industry responses, and a recent acquisition together create a measurable shift in strategy — one that affects the practical role XRP could play in institutional settlement.
Ripple submitted an application for a national trust bank charter in July 2025 for a proposed Ripple National Trust Bank, according to multiple reports summarizing filings and public materials.
The bank would be a limited-purpose trust bank focused on custody, tokenization, and stablecoin services rather than deposit-taking.
On Thursday, 7 August 2025, Ripple announced a $200 million deal to buy Rail, a stablecoin payments platform, which the company said would strengthen its institutional stablecoin and payments stack. Reuters reported the deal and the price.
 
That reception is not universal. The Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) formally opposed Ripple’s application in a letter in August 2025, arguing consumer-protection and prudential concerns to the OCC. The ICBA filing is public.
Other community and civil society groups have also lodged comments opposing national trust charters for crypto firms. Those objections form part of the regulatory submission record.
A national trust bank charter would allow Ripple to offer fiduciary custody and to operate tokenized asset and stablecoin services under federal supervision.
Custody plus native stablecoin issuance would enable Ripple to combine on-chain liquidity (including XRP) with off-chain settlement rails.
That architecture can lower counterparty steps in cross-border flows. The practical effect depends on liquidity, counterparty acceptance, and regulatory permissions.
Rail’s acquisition for $200m gives Ripple an off-the-shelf stablecoin engineering and payments stack. Reuters noted the purchase on 7 Aug 2025 and framed the deal as part of Ripple’s push to expand institutional offerings.
The Rail asset is explicitly tied to stablecoin issuance and payments plumbing — a clear infrastructure component for settlement products.
What this means for XRP as a settlement asset
A trust bank and a stablecoin stack create the operational means to route transactions and custody value. XRP could act as a settlement bridge in a layered architecture: off-chain fiat/stablecoin rails for large value, with XRP used for on-demand liquidity between corridors where there is deep XRP liquidity and counterparty acceptance.
That is a plausible engineering design. The degree to which XRP becomes the “core” of global settlements depends on institutional adoption, liquidity concentration, and regulatory acceptance — all measurable but unresolved factors.
Ripple’s trust-bank application and its purchase of Rail are verifiable, concrete steps that build regulated custody and stablecoin capability.
Those steps materially increase Ripple’s capacity to offer tokenized settlement services. They do not, alone, make XRP the de facto core of global settlements.
That outcome would require broad institutional acceptance, concentrated XRP liquidity across corridors, and a cleared regulatory path — each a measurable gate that remains to be won or lost in public record.
Source: https://zycrypto.com/ripples-trust-bank-strategy-plus-200m-rail-buy-could-transform-xrp-into-settlement-backbone/