Ripple has secured a crucial regulatory position in the European Union, marking the company’s second major licensing victory in less than a week.
On January 14, the cryptocurrency-focused payments company announced that it had received preliminary approval from Luxembourg’s regulator, the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (CSSF), for an Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license.
Although the approval is technically preliminary, Ripple has presented the move as the strategic gateway that will allow it to bring its services to the 27 EU member states.
This puts the company on a collision course with the region’s traditional banking infrastructure, just as the Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulations are reshaping the competitive landscape.
A dual-hub strategy and global momentum
Ripple’s Luxembourg license is not an isolated event, but the latest part of a carefully orchestrated two-hub strategy for Europe.
The move comes just days after Ripple confirmed it had received approval from the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for an EMI license and cryptoasset registration.
This combined regulatory expansion positions Ripple with a dual-anchored business model that uses London to service the deep UK treasury and currency markets, while using Luxembourg to access the broader European single market.
The regulatory permissions are already stress tested through live banking implementations. Last December, Ripple announced that AMINA Bank had become Ripple Payments’ first European banking customer.
The Switzerland-based bank uses Ripple’s licensed end-to-end payment solution for near real-time cross-border transfers.
Monica Long, Chairman of Ripple, said:
“The EU was one of the first major jurisdictions to introduce comprehensive regulation of digital assets, providing the certainty financial institutions need to move blockchain from pilots to commercial scale. By expanding Ripple’s licensing portfolio and developing our payments solution, we’re doing more than just moving money. We’re managing the end-to-end flow of value to unlock trillions in dormant capital and move legacy finance into a digital future.”
Europe has raised the bar for all payments. The ECB’s Instant Payments Regulation forces traditional banks into mandatory instant settlement, eroding the speed advantage that crypto once claimed.
Meanwhile, Ripple’s expansion comes as the company reports significant operational growth. Ripple stated that the momentum is now global, citing a portfolio of more than 75 licenses and registrations worldwide and more than $95 billion in transaction volume processed to date.
The company also claims to reach 90% of the daily foreign exchange markets, a statistic that suggests the network is well past its experimental stage.
The compliance layer of XRPL
Ripple’s licensing push runs parallel to a technical overhaul of the XRP Ledger (XRPL), the decentralized blockchain that underpins its settlement products.
The company has consistently maintained that its goal is to make the ledger more similar to the regulated settlement layers that compliance departments demand.
A key part of this roadmap is the introduction of ‘Permissioned Domains’, a feature that allows institutions to operate on a public network with strict controls.
The technical nuance here is critical to institutional adoption.
Banks often avoid public blockchains because they have no control over who they transact with. Permissioned Domains solve this by creating ‘walled gardens’ in the ledger.
This functionality opens the door for complex financial transactions. RippleX, the developer arm of the company, explained that the upcoming Lending Protocol can also apply Permissioned Domains for controlled lending and borrowing flows.
Taking this into consideration, RippleX stated that the update represents a “game-changer for XRPL, as they bring institutional-quality controls to a public network, without sacrificing the trade-offs of a private chain.”
The Allowed Domains amendment is approaching the threshold for activation.
For executives at Ripple, it’s not just about code, but about opening specific payment corridors that were previously too risky or complex to automate.
Luke Judges, a Ripple executive, emphasized the commercial utility of the upgrade by pointing out that it could enable payment flows across the corridor from the Brazilian Real (BRL) to the USD, with XRPL as the settlement trail.
Does XRP Win?
Crypto traders treated these developments as bullish for XRP, the native token of the XRPL. The asset climbed more than 3% to around $2.17 at the time of writing.
The main question, however, is not whether this new stack of licenses can spark a short-term rally. The question is whether regulatory momentum in Europe will translate into structural demand for XRP, or whether it will mainly accelerate a stablecoin-based payment model that reduces the token’s role to an optional routing tool.
It is striking that Ripple’s product design leaves both outcomes on the table.
Ripple Payments can move value by purchasing XRP, sending it through the chain and paying out in local currency. It can also route the same transaction flow using stablecoins such as RLUSD.
That flexibility is attractive to banks and payments companies, but creates a split investment narrative: the same compliance “green lights” could expand Ripple’s distribution while simultaneously shifting settlement volume away from XRP.
Thus, in a stablecoin-first regime, Europe’s compliance position, sovereign bond preferences, and accounting realities may favor fiat-pegged assets, pushing more flow toward RLUSD.
AMINA’s RLUSD integration indicates that this track is already available. Under that setup, XRP becomes a specialist instrument used when it is cheaper, faster or significantly more liquid than the stablecoin alternative in a given corridor.
Meanwhile, a mixed routing regime would be more constructive for XRP, although it remains conditional.
XRP could capture volume where market makers are willing to absorb volatility risk and where regulated liquidity deepens enough to make it a reliable bridge. This would be useful in corridors where direct stablecoin pairs are sparse or fragmented.
The latter scenario is based on XRP, with banks, payment companies and liquidity providers consistently preferring the native token for their operations.
However, this outcome is the most difficult to rely on because it depends on treasury policies, risk limits and liquidity provision decisions within institutions.
Fundamentally, what seems more likely is an architecture in which stablecoins do more of the heavy lifting as they become embedded in cross-border workflows, with XRP competing for market share where it offers a clear, measurable advantage.
