Ripple has backed a new institutional credit fund that will provide RLUSD working capital loans to fintech and payments companies through the XRP Ledger. According to reports from CoinDesk, the fund will be managed by Cicada Partners who will source borrowers, set lending terms and oversee credit risk, while Clearpool is developing the lending infrastructure. The companies did not disclose the planned size of the fund or the amount Ripple has committed to the project. As reported by BigGo Finance, Ripple participates as a limited partner on the same terms as other investors rather than guaranteeing losses, with all investors sharing the same rights and risks on a pari passu basis.
Under the fund structure, Cicada Partners will serve as the fund's general partner and credit-pool manager, having previously underwritten more than $860 million in credit. As reported by CoinDesk, Clearpool's lending platform has facilitated more than $930 million in institutional loans since 2021, making it a trusted lender to expand its model. The fund targets real-world business borrowers including fintechs, payment companies and crypto service providers that use stablecoins to address their working capital requirements. The RLUSD stablecoin operates under New York Department of Financial Services oversight, while Bank of New York provides custody support, adding institutional credibility to the lending structure.
Borrowers approved for the fund will receive RLUSD and repay their loans in the same stablecoin, giving the dollar-pegged token a direct role in the credit cycle. According to the report, this structure separates RLUSD from XRP's network functions, with RLUSD serving as the asset being lent while XRP continues to cover transaction fees and minimum reserve balances. The fund adds another use case for RLUSD beyond its existing settlement and trading applications, with the lending activity moving onto XRPL while maintaining regulatory compliance through institutional oversight.
The credit product requires XLS-65 (Single Asset Vaults) and XLS-66 (Lending Protocol) features that have not yet completed the XRP Ledger's amendment process. As reported by CoinDesk, Clearpool's integration is currently being tested on a development network while these features await mainnet approval. The lending protocol handles issuing and repaying loans directly on the ledger, while the vault system pools money from several lenders under a manager who decides where it goes, in this case Cicada. Permissioned Domains, Credentials and Clawback features allow institutions to impose eligibility and asset controls, while the protocol itself does not impose fixed application-level fees.
The initiative addresses a gap in institutional DeFi adoption, as partners estimate that roughly 98% of yield in decentralized finance still comes from mechanisms including looping, arbitrage, basis trades, points and liquidity mining rather than productive lending. According to Cicada Partners, this has left institutional allocators without a clear path into onchain credit, even as stablecoin activity and tokenized private credit continue to grow. The lending code has undergone formal verification by RippleX developers and Common Prefix, with security firm Halborn completing a re-audit that found no critical or high-risk issues. XRP has gained almost 20% over the past 24 hours to trade around $1.30, with the token up about 30% over seven days, following the U.S. Treasury's announcement of expanding its long-dated bond buyback program.
