Ripple is targeting 2027 to move more payment activity directly onto XRPL, potentially connecting its payments business with the ledger’s DEX, stablecoins and institutional liquidity infrastructure.
XLS-66 could be the bigger institutional unlock, introducing native fixed-term, underwritten lending and potentially allowing XRP liquidity pools to finance real-world payment companies.
More XRPL activity does not automatically mean a higher XRP price. The stronger bullish case depends on whether institutions actually hold, lend and deploy XRP as productive capital rather than primarily using RLUSD or other tokenized assets.
Ripple is preparing to make 2027 a potentially important year for the XRP Ledger, with a strategy that moves beyond simply settling payments and toward putting credit directly on-chain.
Speaking at XRP Seoul 2026 on Oct. 3, Ripple President Monica Long said the company is considering making the migration of customer transaction volume directly onto the XRP Ledger (XRPL) a major company-wide objective for 2027. Ripple also plans to expand a payment pilot using XRPL’s decentralized exchange and connect its payments business with an emerging lending infrastructure.
The potentially bigger development for XRP, however, is credit.
Long said Ripple is already running credit-related pilots and is working on a model where XRP supplied to lending pools could help fund payment customers.
The plan effectively connects four previously separate pieces: XRP, payments, institutional credit and XRPL’s native lending infrastructure.
🚨 JUST IN: Ripple President Monica Long says Ripple's 2027 direction: bring customer transactions across the company onto the XRP Ledger.
The big unlock? Payments + credit.
Via the XLS-66 Lending Protocol: → Short-term credit from liquidity pools → XRP used as collateral →…
The real question is whether Ripple’s 2027 strategy creates sustained demand for XRP itself.
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Ripple wants to bring more payment volume onto XRPL
Ripple’s first objective is relatively straightforward: move more of the transaction activity generated by its payments business onto XRPL.
Long said Ripple successfully tested using XRPL’s built-in DEX for payments during 2026 and hopes to scale that approach substantially in 2027.
The experiment also appears to have changed Ripple’s thinking about institutional blockchain adoption.
Instead of expecting banks and payment companies to integrate directly with public blockchain infrastructure, Ripple can potentially abstract away some of the complications —including permissioning, privacy and control — while XRPL operates underneath the payment product.
However, for institutional customers, the selling point does not necessarily have to be “use DeFi.” They could continue interacting with familiar financial infrastructure while blockchain liquidity and settlement operate behind the scenes.
Ripple’s wider institutional roadmap already reflects that approach. The company has been adding credentials, permissioned markets, tokenization infrastructure and other features designed to make public-ledger finance compatible with institutional requirements.
Long has separately argued that regulated stablecoins will become deeply integrated into global payments and expects financial institutions to use them for 24/7 collateral mobility by 2027.
Payments, however, are only one part of the equation.
XLS-66 Could Turn XRPL From a Settlement Network Into a Credit Market
Credit is where Ripple’s strategy becomes more interesting.
The proposed XLS-66 Lending Protocol introduces native fixed-term, uncollateralized lending to XRPL. It works alongside XLS-65 Single Asset Vaults, which aggregate assets supplied by multiple depositors.
Instead of copying the overcollateralized lending model popularized by crypto DeFi, XLS-66 is designed more like institutional credit.
XLS-66 and XRP-collateralized DeFi: two different credit primitives for developers. | Source: @FlareDevHubBorrowers can receive underwritten loans without depositing crypto worth more than the loan itself. Credit assessment and risk management remain off-chain, while loan origination, repayment and other lifecycle functions are recorded and executed through XRPL.
That architecture is important because traditional financial institutions already have systems for assessing counterparties. Ripple is not attempting to replace the credit department of a bank with an algorithm.
It is trying to move the execution and settlement layer of credit on-chain.
The updated LendingProtocolV1_1 design also introduces closed-ended vaults and cash-basis accounting, under which interest is recognized when payments are actually received rather than recognizing all scheduled interest when a loan originates.
There is also a first-loss mechanism designed to protect vault depositors against defaults. XRPL documentation explicitly describes first-loss capital as a buffer absorbing losses before depositor funds are affected.
That said, these features make XLS-66 considerably more significant than another DeFi lending application.
It is an attempt to build institutional credit primitives into XRPL itself.
Ripple Sees Payment Companies as Natural Borrowers
Long’s latest comments provide a clearer idea of how Ripple intends to use that infrastructure.
Many of Ripple’s payment customers are service providers that already depend on short-term financing, she said. Ripple is therefore exploring how liquidity supplied through XRPL lending protocols could finance some of those payment obligations.
Consider a payment provider that needs liquidity before incoming settlements arrive.
Under traditional infrastructure, it might obtain a working-capital facility from a bank or another credit provider. An XRPL-based structure could potentially pool capital on-chain, underwrite the payment company off-chain and originate the financing through XLS-66.
This is where payments and lending begin reinforcing each other.
Payments create recurring financing requirements. Lending supplies the working capital. Settlement generates on-chain activity. And the same network can potentially support tokenized collateral, stablecoins, XRP liquidity and foreign-exchange conversion.
Ripple has already begun testing parts of this thesis.
In August, Ripple backed an institutional credit initiative with Clearpool and Cicada Partners designed to provide working-capital loans denominated in RLUSD to fintech and payments companies using XRPL’s proposed lending infrastructure. The product depends on XLS-65 and XLS-66 becoming available.
That gives the lending roadmap a concrete commercial use case rather than leaving XLS-66 as purely technical infrastructure.
Could XRP Become the Missing Piece in Institutional Credit?
This is also where XRP holders should pay particularly close attention.
Single Asset Vaults are not restricted to XRP. They can contain XRP, trust-line tokens or Multi-Purpose Tokens.
Likewise, institutional lending on XRPL does not inherently require every loan to use XRP.
XRP Ledger's Batch amendment (XLS-56), backed by over 85% of validators, is set to activate Oct 9, letting up to 8 transactions settle atomically
The Clearpool initiative illustrates the difference: its working-capital loans are intended to be denominated in RLUSD, not XRP. In that model, XRP’s direct role is primarily at the protocol layer through fees and ledger reserves rather than as the principal being borrowed.
Long’s latest comments potentially broaden that relationship.
She said Ripple is developing a structure connecting the lending protocol with payments so that XRP supplied to pools can help fund customer payment needs.
If implemented at scale, that could create a fundamentally different source of XRP demand.
Rather than XRP simply moving between exchanges or briefly bridging two currencies, holders could potentially supply XRP into institutional credit markets. Capital committed to lending vaults would effectively become productive liquidity rather than idle XRP.
Ripple has also said XRP can be borrowed and lent through its planned lending infrastructure, while continuing to function as a bridge asset for FX and settlement.
That combination, settlement asset plus lendable capital, could matter more economically than transaction fees alone.
Why Higher XRPL Volume Does Not Guarantee a Higher XRP Price
There is still a major gap between increased adoption and a bullish price equation.
XRPL transaction fees are extremely small. Greater network activity burns XRP through fees, but payment volume would have to become enormous before fee destruction alone meaningfully changes XRP’s circulating supply.
Stablecoins create another complication.
An institution can settle, borrow or hold RLUSD and other tokenized assets on XRPL without maintaining a proportionally large XRP position. XRP remains necessary for network-level functions, but that does not mean $1 billion of tokenized credit automatically creates $1 billion of XRP demand.
The more important metric could therefore become XRP locked or committed to productive financial activity, rather than raw transaction count.
If XRP-backed lending pools expand, market makers hold larger XRP inventories for settlement, and Ripple routes greater payment volume through XRP liquidity, the effect could be more significant.
Long described the potential outcome as a flywheel involving three elements: utility, liquidity and trust. Greater real-world utility can attract liquidity; deeper liquidity can make XRP more useful to institutions; and institutional participation can improve confidence in the infrastructure.
But a flywheel only works if each component actually feeds the next.
XLS-66 Still Has To Cross the Implementation Hurdle
There is another reason to temper expectations: the lending roadmap is not equivalent to a fully operational lending market today.
XLS-66 remains a proposed XRPL standard, and the functionality depends on the relevant amendments being activated through XRPL’s amendment process. The specification itself remains marked as “Draft.”
The newer LendingProtocolV1_1 architecture adds further changes, including closed-ended vaults and revised accounting.
That means 2027 execution matters far more than announcements.
Investors should watch whether the amendments activate, how much capital enters Single Asset Vaults, what percentage is denominated in XRP, how much credit is actually originated, whether borrowers repeatedly use the system and how much Ripple Payments volume ultimately touches XRPL.
Those numbers would provide much stronger evidence for XRP’s valuation case than transaction counts alone.
Credit Could Be XRPL’s Next Institutional Unlock
Ripple’s 2027 strategy represents an important change in ambition.
The company spent years pitching blockchain as a faster way to move money. The next phase is about what institutions can do with money once it is on-chain.
Ripple itself described this missing layer earlier this year: tokenizing and transferring assets solves only part of the problem because functioning capital markets also require borrowing, collateral and liquidity.
XLS-66 attempts to provide that second layer.
If Ripple can connect its existing payment customers with XRPL’s DEX, stablecoin liquidity and institutional credit markets, XRPL could evolve from primarily a settlement network into infrastructure supporting an entire financing cycle.
For XRP, that creates a potentially more meaningful catalyst than simply processing additional transactions.
The strongest scenario is not millions of tiny XRP fees being burned. It is institutions finding reasons to hold, lend, borrow, bridge and deploy XRP as working capital.
That potential utility is emerging alongside considerably more aggressive expectations in the XRP market. On Oct. 4, pseudonymous analyst Dark Defender mapped a long-term path toward $36.77, arguing that XRP has completed the first wave of its current structure and is now in Wave 2.
His weekly chart initially targets $4.10 and $7.07, followed by Fibonacci levels around $10.11 and $18.23, before an eventual $36.77 target.
The projection should not be confused with Ripple’s own expectations. Dark Defender’s targets are based on Elliott Wave and Fibonacci analysis, while Ripple’s 2027 strategy provides a separate fundamental question: could greater institutional use create enough sustained XRP demand to support significantly higher valuations?
XLS-66 alone cannot answer that question. Reaching $36 would require a dramatic repricing of XRP and likely far broader adoption than simply launching an institutional lending protocol.
But Ripple’s roadmap could provide measurable evidence for, or against, the underlying bullish thesis. Investors can watch how much XRP enters lending pools, whether payment companies actually borrow through XRPL and how much Ripple Payments volume ultimately moves on-chain.
Whether that is enough to push XRP’s price toward $36, or even substantially above current levels, will ultimately depend on scale.
If Ripple’s 2027 roadmap succeeds, XRP’s investment thesis could increasingly be measured not by how quickly the token can move across the ledger, but by how much institutional capital has a reason to keep it there.
Disclaimer:
The information provided in this article is for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be, nor should it be construed as, financial advice. We do not make any warranties regarding the completeness, reliability, or accuracy of this information. All investments involve risk, and past performance does not guarantee future results. We recommend consulting a financial advisor before making any investment decisions.
Dr. Guneet Kaur is a senior editor at CCN.com and a Science Fellow at Exponential Science. She is a fintech and blockchain expert with extensive experience in digital finance education, blockchain ecosystems, and cryptocurrency markets. She has worked with global media such as Cointelegraph, as well as education and blockchain platforms, to design and lead strategic content and learning initiatives. As an educator and assessor for top-tier executive programs, she bridges real-world fintech trends with academic insight.
Dr. Kaur is also a published researcher and peer reviewer across fintech and data science journals, including Financial Innovation Journal and International Journal of Big Data Intelligence and Applications. Her work spans data-driven analysis, Web3 innovation, and technical content development. With a strong foundation in both industry and academia, she translates complex financial technologies into practical applications, empowering learners, professionals, and institutions across the rapidly evolving digital finance landscape.
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