Banking Giant Deploys Ripple Tech on XRP Ledger: Main Crypto News This Morning

TL;DR

Morning trading on Monday, October 12, 2026, opened with price consolidation for the cryptocurrency market. Bitcoin recovered to $83,340 after Friday’s drop to $81,000, keeping the market capitalization in the range of $2.82–2.90 trillion. Trading volume during the European session was a moderate $52–58 billion ahead of the opening of the American trading venues.

The rebound from the lows triggered a wave of forced closures of short positions. According to Coinglass, the daily volume of liquidations on exchanges totaled $229.43 million, of which 65.3% ($149.84 million) fell on sellers.

While ETF inflows have paused, Strategy purchased another 250 Bitcoins, increasing its balance to 848,250 coins.

This is consistent with the overall on-chain trend: over the last 12 months, investors moved more than 710,000 Bitcoins (about $59.5 billion) from exchanges to cold wallets.

The main trigger of the morning was an infrastructure launch: Standard Chartered opened a custody service for the Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin on the XRP Ledger network through its Dubai branch.

At the same time, trading in shares of Evernorth, which operates as a public XRP treasury, began on Nasdaq under the ticker XRPN.

Custody worth billions and an ex-director of Coinbase at the helm. A new stage for the XRP ecosystem

Standard Chartered’s custody service, launched jointly with LMAX Group, uses a collateral mirroring model. Institutional clients can use the RLUSD stablecoin for margin trading without directly transferring the asset to an exchange, which eliminates the operational costs of cross-border transfers.

This launch completes the banking giant’s multi-year transition from early blockchain experiments to full-fledged industrial infrastructure. The companies’ relationship dates back to 2015, when Standard Chartered conducted its first distributed ledger tests in trade finance and entered Ripple’s capital, investing $55 million in the Series B round.

Since then, the partnership has evolved from RippleNet’s commercial cross-border corridors, where the XRP token was not yet used, to venture financing of the market maker Keyrock and the integration of the bank’s custody arm Zodia with Metaco infrastructure.

The current step takes the XRP Ledger ecosystem to a new level of tokenization. According to current data from rwa.xyz:

• The total value of represented assets on XRPL is $4.47 billion.

• The RWA sector volume is recorded at $496.45 million.

• Stablecoin capitalization on the network stands at $1.18 billion.

The thirty-day volume of tokenized asset transfers grew by 1,456.8%, reaching $7.03 billion. The largest product remains the Ondo Short-Term US Government Bond Fund with a balance of $185.11 million.

In parallel, RippleX and the XRP Ledger Foundation closed a critical bug in the payment engine that had existed since 2015. The vulnerability, discovered by the Veria AI team, led to a 64-bit number overflow during the execution of an order chain, allowing XRP to be purchased for pennies through the automatic generation of the difference by the ledger code.

The fix was released in rippled 3.4.1; an on-chain audit confirmed that the vulnerability was never exploited on the public network.

Against this backdrop, Class A shares of Evernorth (XRPN) and its warrants (XRPNW) debuted on Nasdaq after the merger with the SPAC Armada. The treasury fund holds 473 million XRP (about $672 million) and $300 million in cash on its balance sheet.

Evernorth’s new chief investment officer Hugo Zhandeboz (formerly co-CIO of Coinbase Asset Management) announced that XRP reserves will be directed into credit derivatives strategies and liquidity pools in DeFi to increase yield per share. The institutions SBI and Arrington control 39.9% and 19.9% of the shares, respectively. A 6-month lock-up has been set for Ripple.

Binance checks and farewell to mining. What else happened on the crypto market this morning

Wallets linked to the Ethereum Foundation resumed selling, transferring 4,393 ETH (about $11.13 million) to the Kraken exchange. The addresses received these funds 10 years ago in the genesis distribution and have gradually cashed out 49,751 ETH on Kraken at an average historical price of $658.

The US Department of Justice has launched a review of Binance for compliance with the terms of the 2023 global settlement, under which the exchange paid $4.3 billion. Investigators are examining transactions through Hong Kong companies that may be linked to sanctions evasion. The agency has not brought any new formal charges, and Binance stated that it fully complies with sanctions compliance requirements.

The mining infrastructure of the previous cycle continues to be repurposed for artificial intelligence. The Dutch investment company SWI Group raised 800 million euros from institutional investors at a business valuation of 6.1 billion euros. The capital will go toward modernizing the data centers of the miner Genesis Digital Assets (formerly owned by Alameda Research).

SWI CEO Max-Hervé George told the WSJ that the holding is completely ceasing Bitcoin mining, shifting all capacity to serving AI computing.

In other news, as part of the regulatory track, the CFTC is preparing federal rules for retail margin trading of crypto products, and Dubai’s VARA regulator has issued Kraken operational approval to launch trading in pairs with the dirham (AED).

At last but not least, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates warned in an interview with CNN about a rise in AI cyberattacks over the next 12 months due to hackers removing protective filters from commercial language models.

Bitcoin near the 60% mark. What the market should prepare for this week

The technical picture points to market stabilization after the unloading of margin positions. Price movement is sideways, without pronounced speculative skews. The Bitcoin dominance index is near the 60% mark, concentrating capital in systemic assets ahead of the release of macroeconomic statistics from the US.

Key factors and triggers of the current week:

• October 12–17: Annual meeting of the IMF and the World Bank in Washington.

• Wednesday, October 14 (15:30 UTC): US Consumer Price Index (CPI) for September — the Fed’s benchmark for the interest rate.

• Wednesday, October 14 (21:00 UTC): Publication of the Fed’s economic review, the “Beige Book.”

• Thursday, October 15 (15:30 UTC): Release of the Producer Price Index (PPI) and US unemployment data.

• Friday, October 16 (06:30 UTC): Speech by Fed Chair Kevin Warsh.

Bitcoin (BTC): trading at $83,340 (+0.31%) with dominance of 59.38%. Support has formed at $82,000, and MicroStrategy’s purchases create a solid price floor for the current consolidation.

Ethereum (ETH): recovered to $2,544 (+1.58%) with dominance of 11.02%. The token holds above the $2,500 support, where spot pressure from the Ethereum Foundation was fully offset by the closing of $54.84 million in shorts. The nearest resistance is $2,620.

XRP and altcoins: XRP holds the $1.3980 level (+0.29%) with a market share of 3.13%. The Evernorth listing and the launch of Standard Chartered’s custody fully neutralized the technological risks of the closed bug. Solana (SOL) recovered to $110.94 (+1.22%), and BNB holds the $749.37 mark (+0.08%), showing a neutral reaction to the Department of Justice review.