Standard Chartered Launches RLUSD Custody in Dubai, Plans LMAX Collateral Link

Standard Chartered‘s Dubai branch has begun offering regulated institutional custody of Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin on the XRP Ledger, giving eligible clients a bank-grade home for the dollar-pegged token. The bank, which manages nearly $450 billion in assets, is also working with Ripple and institutional trading venue LMAX Group on an arrangement that would let clients use RLUSD held at Standard Chartered as collateral for trades on LMAX’s platform, without transferring the stablecoin to the venue itself.

That collateral link is not yet operational. Standard Chartered said it remains subject to documentation, testing, regulatory requirements, and internal approvals. The underlying logic, separating custody from execution so that a bank holds the tokens while a venue accepts their value as margin, addresses a concern that has kept some institutions at arm’s length from stablecoin-settled trading: the reluctance to park assets at a non-bank counterparty. Ripple had already extended $150 million in financing to LMAX in January as part of plans to embed RLUSD into LMAX’s institutional infrastructure.

The Dubai custody launch is part of a broader custody build-out at Standard Chartered. The bank said last week it plans to offer Singapore-based institutional clients custody for selected cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and tokenised real-world assets, following its full acquisition of Zodia Custody earlier this year. In August it became the first bank to distribute one of Hong Kong’s two regulated stablecoins. For Ripple, each new custody and collateral integration moves RLUSD closer to the settlement and margin rails that institutions actually use, rather than confining the token to payments or spot settlement.