Ripple’s latest think piece on the XRP Ledger (XRPL) makes a blunt case that institutional finance will not move on-chain at scale without first-class privacy—and that the missing capability can be delivered without abandoning public-chain transparency or compliance.
Akinyele, a cryptographer with a decade of applied-privacy work, sets out a two-track roadmap: embed privacy primitives directly into infrastructure, and pair them with mechanisms that let market participants—and regulators—verify rules were followed without exposing sensitive data.
He points to zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) for selective disclosure and confidential computing for protected off-chain logic, alongside “fair ordering” via trusted execution environments to mitigate frontrunning and MEV. The throughline is that confidentiality and accountability are not opposites; in his words, programmable privacy can enable institutions to “prove adherence to compliance requirements… without revealing sensitive transaction data.”
The argument is also a critique of how some chains pursued throughput by eroding trust assumptions. Akinyele contends that scale must be achieved without sacrificing verifiability or decentralization, and he situates ZK light clients, fair ordering, and enclave-based confidential computation as complementary parts of that design space.
The XRPL angle here is that features historically built into the protocol—such as the native DEX, escrow, and payment channels—can be extended with privacy and compliance controls at the same layer, rather than scattered across bespoke contracts. Ripple’s documentation positions MPTs as a “version 2” fungible token standard that distills lessons from trust-line tokens and is being integrated more deeply into issuance, trading, and settlement flows on XRPL’s native rails.
Akinyele’s near-term horizon is explicit. He writes that the next 12 months will prioritize ZKPs on XRPL to enable private, compliant transactions while improving scalability, and that 2026 is targeted for “confidential MPTs” bringing privacy-preserving tokenized collateral to market. That roadmap triangulates with the standards draft now under discussion and with the October 1 activation of baseline MPTs, which collectively sketch a path from private issuance to private trading and settlement—without asking institutions to abandon the assurance that public chains provide.
The message to institutions is unambiguous and, in Akinyele’s framing, non-negotiable. Privacy is not a bolt-on for bad actors; it is the precondition for legitimate finance to operate in the open. “With programmable privacy, we can have both,” he writes—confidentiality for users and counterparties, and verifiable compliance for auditors and regulators. For XRPL specifically, the combination of a live protocol-level token standard and an active proposal to make those tokens confidential signals a bet that public-chain neutrality, with privacy and compliance embedded, is the architecture that can unlock the next wave of tokenized assets.
At press time, XRP traded at $3.04.
