Who Else Is Building on the XRP Ledger Besides Ripple?

One of the biggest misconceptions around XRP is hiding in plain sight.

People talk about Ripple and the XRP Ledger as though they are the same organisation.

They aren't.

Ripple is an important contributor, large XRP holder and one of the biggest commercial companies building products connected with the XRP ecosystem. But XRPL is an open-source public network on which independent companies, developers and financial institutions can build their own products. XRPL's own documentation notes that Ripple runs only one validator on the default Unique Node List.

If Ripple disappeared tomorrow, the question would therefore not be “Who owns XRPL now?”

The better question would be “Who keeps building?”

There are quite a few answers.

Xaman: The Front Door for Many XRPL Users

For many people who actually use XRPL rather than keeping XRP on a centralised exchange, Xaman is one of the most recognisable applications in the ecosystem.

Xaman is a non-custodial wallet designed around XRPL. Users hold their own keys and can interact directly with applications and ledger functionality.

That makes it more than somewhere to display an XRP balance.

Think about traditional banking.

SWIFT can provide infrastructure, Visa can provide payment rails and central banks can provide settlement money, but ordinary users still need applications through which they interact with those systems.

Wallet developers fill some of that interface layer in blockchain.

Infrastructure is not useful if nobody can operate it.

Bithomp, XRPScan and the People Making the Ledger Visible

Blockchains produce enormous quantities of public data.

Someone still has to turn that data into something a human can read.

Bithomp and XRPScan provide explorers and analytics around XRPL. XRPL's ecosystem directory also lists infrastructure providers and developer tools such as XRP Toolkit, Towo Labs and Cryptum.

These projects are not glamorous in the way a billion-dollar token launch is glamorous.

They are plumbing.

And finance runs on plumbing.

Ask anyone who has spent two days reconciling an unexplained settlement difference during month-end. The system that tells you what actually happened to a transaction can become much more valuable than the system with the best marketing department.

Ondo Finance Is Bringing US Treasuries to XRPL

Institutional tokenisation is one of the most interesting areas developing on XRPL.

In June 2025, Ondo Finance's OUSG, representing tokenised short-term US government Treasuries for eligible investors, went live on XRPL. Qualified purchasers can subscribe and redeem using RLUSD as part of the settlement process.

This is worth understanding properly.

Ondo is not building another XRP-themed wallet.

It is putting a traditional financial asset onto blockchain infrastructure.

A Treasury security already has an economic purpose, an issuer, a yield and accounting treatment. Tokenisation changes the machinery used to hold and move the exposure.

For institutional finance, that is much easier to explain than inventing an entirely new asset and asking the CFO to understand why it exists.

Guggenheim Treasury Services and Digital Commercial Paper

Fixed-income infrastructure is developing as well.

Guggenheim Treasury Services, through Zeconomy's platform, has brought digital commercial paper to XRPL. The product is aimed at qualified institutional participants and represents another attempt to put regulated financial instruments onto blockchain rails.

Commercial paper is hardly a crypto-native idea.

Corporate treasurers have been using short-term debt markets for generations.

Putting those instruments on XRPL turns the conversation from “What can blockchain invent?” toward a much more practical question:

“Can blockchain make existing capital markets cheaper, faster or easier to operate?”

That is a healthier conversation.

Mercado Bitcoin Is Tokenising Financial Assets

Latin America provides another example.

Mercado Bitcoin announced plans to tokenise more than $200 million of regulated real-world assets on XRPL, including fixed-income and equity-income instruments.

Again, notice what is happening.

XRPL is being treated as infrastructure.

Ripple may support ecosystem development, provide liquidity or participate commercially in some projects, but the asset issuer and business proposition can belong to somebody else.

A healthy blockchain should eventually look like that.

Nobody says the internet is an Alphabet product because Google runs on it.

Developers Are Expanding What XRPL Can Do

XRPL's ecosystem is also expanding technically.

Sidechains allow developers to experiment with functionality that does not need to be pushed directly onto the main ledger. XRPL documentation identifies projects including Xahau for smart-contract-style functionality and the XRPL EVM environment for Ethereum-compatible applications.

Cross-chain infrastructure is developing as well.

XRPL's EVM environment uses interoperability technology to connect with other blockchain ecosystems, while Wormhole has also been integrating cross-chain messaging and asset movement with XRPL infrastructure.

That matters because blockchains operating as isolated islands eventually hit the same problem banks did.

Liquidity gets trapped in separate systems.

Someone has to build bridges.

The Community Is Bigger Than the Famous Names

The XRPL ecosystem directory spans infrastructure, wallets, developer tooling, interoperability, exchanges, gaming, NFTs, payments, custody and other areas.

XRPL Commons also runs education, accelerator and residency programs for developers, while various grant programs support projects building on the network.

Most of those developers will never appear beside Brad Garlinghouse at a conference.

That is normal.

Most companies that make the modern banking system function aren't household names either.

Try running a bank without custody vendors, payment processors, identity providers, messaging infrastructure, market-data systems, reconciliation software and cybersecurity companies.

The logos consumers recognise are only the front of the machine.

Is XRPL Really Decentralised From Ripple?

This question deserves more than a slogan.

Ripple remains unusually important to the XRP ecosystem because of its history, XRP holdings, engineering contributions, brand and commercial investment.

Pretending otherwise would be silly.

But importance is different from ownership.

XRPL is open source. Independent validators participate in consensus. Developers can build applications without asking Ripple for permission, and assets can be issued and transferred by organisations that have no corporate relationship with Ripple.

The healthiest long-term development for XRPL would actually be for Ripple to become proportionally less important.

Not because Ripple fails.

Because everyone else grows.

What Should XRP Investors Watch?

Don't simply count partnership announcements.

Watch what goes live.

Look for assets issued on XRPL, transaction activity, liquidity, users, institutional custody, DEX activity, tokenised financial instruments, stablecoins and applications that generate repeated use.

A pilot is not production.

A memorandum of understanding is not revenue.

A press release is definitely not adoption.

Anyone who has been through an ERP implementation knows the difference. The PowerPoint presentation in January always looks beautiful. The meaningful day is when the transactions actually hit the ledger and Finance has to reconcile them.

XRPL should be judged the same way.