Ripple Senior Vice President Markus Infanger, the head of RippleX, argues the XRP Ledger (XRPL) is built for the next phase of real-world-asset tokenization and says today’s SPV-heavy market is only a bridge to “native issuance.”
In an Aug. 12 blog post, Infanger draws a direct line from the 1970s shift in capital markets — when Euroclear and DTCC immobilized paper certificates in vaults while moving ownership records to be electronic — to today’s tokenization stack.
He says Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) play a comparable, transitional role now: legally familiar wrappers that hold the off-ledger asset (treasuries, real estate, credit) while issuing a tokenized representation on a network. The model is “clunky” and centralized, he acknowledges, but useful as infrastructure, standards and policy mature. It is, in his words, “scaffolding,” not the end state.
The “endgame,” Infanger contends, is native issuance — assets “born digital,” where the token is the legal instrument, compliance is enforced by code, settlement is atomic, and liquidity is composable across venues rather than trapped in wrappers and intermediaries.
Infanger’s case for XRPL centers on protocol-level capabilities intended for financial use from the outset, which he argues reduce integration work and operational risk for institutions moving from SPVs toward native issuance:
To illustrate the direction of travel, Infanger cites a pilot by Ctrl Alt with Dubai’s land regulator to mint property ownership records on XRPL. By recording titles natively, the scheme aims to streamline transfers, improve auditability and embed supervisory visibility.
Ctrl Alt also plans to integrate Ripple Custody for secure storage of tokenized deeds—an example of how ledger-level functionality and institutional-grade custody can be paired in production.
Infanger cautions against writing off SPVs.
They remain the pragmatic path for institutions that must operate under current law, satisfy auditors and test operational readiness. But, he argues, immobilization in the 1970s paved the way for full dematerialization; likewise, SPVs can onboard capital and inform policy while the industry builds toward assets that are “born digital,” with compliance and settlement embedded at the protocol layer.
The message to banks, asset managers and treasurers is incremental rather than revolutionary: use SPVs where needed today, but design with native issuance in mind.
Infanger’s bet is that a public, finance-oriented ledger with built-in exchange, liquidity and credit standards will shorten that path — reducing bespoke code, simplifying controls and making on-ledger assets behave more like mainstream financial instruments at scale.
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