Ripple Pitches Custody Playbook as 37 Banks Gear Up for Euro Stablecoin

Ripple published a Nov. 9 assessment of what banks need before they custody digital assets, framing custody, governance and core-banking integration as its home turf. The timing is deliberate: Qivalis, the Amsterdam-based joint venture building a euro stablecoin, now counts 37 member banks across 15 countries after adding 25 institutions in May. ING, BNP Paribas, BBVA and DZ BANK are among the participants.

Cassie Craddock, Ripple's vice president and managing director, tied the moment to regulation. With the EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets rules now established across Europe, she said the region's banks are emboldened to launch the digital asset offerings their customers are asking for. Ripple's pitch covers issuance, custody, governance, settlement and redemption, with application programming interfaces linking its tech to banking software and software-defined policies policing access, approvals, separation of duties and jurisdictional controls.

Two consortium members already sit in Ripple's client book. BBVA's custody agreement with Ripple powers bitcoin and ether services for retail customers in Spain, with the bank keeping control of its cryptographic keys and responsibility for client assets; the relationship stretches to custody operations in Switzerland and Turkey. DZ BANK, the central institution for Germany's cooperative banking group, picked Metaco's custody platform for institutional digital asset services — Metaco is the Swiss custody tech provider Ripple acquired in 2023. DZ BANK wanted to handle crypto securities under Germany's Electronic Securities Act inside its existing capital-market processes, and an early application involved a Siemens tokenized bond held with German asset manager Union Investment.

Qivalis has its regulatory footing. De Nederlandsche Bank, the Dutch central bank, authorized the venture as an electronic money institution, with its register listing issuance, distribution and redemption permissions effective Oct. 13 and placing Qivalis under ongoing DNB supervision. The plan is a full-reserve model, each token backed 1:1 by reserves, with Qivalis running issuance and redemption under its own authorizations and technology. Banks themselves decide their customer custody arrangements — keep it in-house or hand it to a provider.

In its Oct. 14 announcement, Qivalis said issuance is planned within the following months, subject to MiCA requirements and publication of its white paper. Distribution would run through eligible banks, exchanges, payment providers and financial market infrastructure participants.