CSD BR, a central securities depository authorized by Brazil's central bank, announced a partnership with Ripple on September 29 to bring the XRP Ledger into live financial market infrastructure. The first phase will tokenize and mirror BTG Pactual investment fund shares on the blockchain, which marks what the companies describe as a shift from pilot testing into real operation with live transactions.
CSD BR oversees more than BRL 22 trillion in registered assets and can process millions of transactions within minutes. Under this initial phase, the XRP Ledger will not replace CSD BR's existing systems. It will function as an additional layer for recording and auditing, with CSD BR's own infrastructure remaining the official source of record for registration, deposit, and settlement.
A licensed central securities depository is recording securities ownership on a public blockchain for the first time — on the XRP Ledger. 🇧🇷
— Ripple (@Ripple) September 30, 2026
CSD BR is partnering with Ripple to bring Brazil's regulated capital markets onchain, starting with BTG Pactual fund shares, secured by…
Why mirroring comes before native issuance
Daniel Polano Spreafico, Head of Products and Clients at CSD BR, explained the sequencing directly.
"We chose to start with record mirroring because it is the safest and most responsible way to introduce a new technology into critical market infrastructure," Spreafico said. "In this phase, current processes remain unchanged for investors, issuers and participants. The goal is to evaluate how the technology performs under real operating conditions and build a solid foundation for future developments."
The tokenized shares will use the Multi-Purpose Token, or MPT, standard on the XRP Ledger. MPT is a native XRPL feature designed specifically for representing regulated financial instruments on-chain with built-in compliance controls, distinct from earlier fungible token standards on the ledger. Its design allows issuers to embed authorization requirements, transfer restrictions, and freeze capabilities directly into the token itself rather than relying entirely on external smart contract logic, which matters for a regulated securities depository that needs governance controls to survive the transition onto a public ledger.
How CSD BR keeps regulatory control over a public blockchain
The environment operates on a permissioned basis, restricted to corporate and banking clients in Brazil that meet KYC and AML requirements. CSD BR retains full authority over issuance and administration, including the ability to authorize participants, freeze individual assets, and reverse transactions through clawback when required by regulatory or judicial order.
This governance structure addresses the core tension regulators typically raise about using a public blockchain for regulated securities: public ledgers are generally designed to be permissionless and irreversible, properties that conflict directly with securities law requirements around participant eligibility and court-ordered remedies. By building freeze and clawback authority into the token standard itself and restricting network access to KYC-verified participants, CSD BR preserves the legal characteristics regulators require while still gaining the transparency and auditability benefits of a shared, cryptographically verifiable ledger. This is functionally similar to how Ripple structured RLUSD's own smart contract permissions, and reflects a broader industry pattern where permissioned access sits on top of otherwise public blockchain infrastructure to satisfy both technology goals and compliance mandates simultaneously.
Silvio Pegado, Ripple's Managing Director for Latin America, called the shift significant for the industry as a whole.
"Moving beyond pilots and proofs of concept to a live record-keeping infrastructure in a national capital market is a major milestone for the industry," Pegado said. "This partnership shows how distributed ledger technology can be safely incorporated into critical financial infrastructure in a regulated way."
What comes after the mirroring phase
Once the initial phase is validated, the partnership plans to expand blockchain use toward native asset issuance and trading directly between authorized participants. Assets under consideration for future phases include Real Estate Receivables Certificates, known as CRI, and Agribusiness Receivables Certificates, known as CRA, both significant segments of Brazil's fixed-income market.
Brazil's fixed-income securitization market, which includes CRI and CRA instruments, has grown substantially over the past decade as a financing channel for the country's large real estate and agribusiness sectors. These instruments typically involve complex chains of underlying receivables and multiple intermediaries for registration and settlement, a structure that creates exactly the kind of reconciliation friction blockchain-based record-keeping is designed to reduce. Extending the CSD BR model to these asset classes would represent a considerably larger technical and regulatory undertaking than mirroring fund shares, since native issuance requires the blockchain layer to become authoritative instead of merely a complementary audit trail.
The companies also said future development will include advanced confidentiality mechanisms to meet financial market privacy requirements, and that while the initial focus is Brazilian assets and institutions, the model was designed to allow expansion to new asset classes, new participants, and potentially other international markets.
Luis Furtado, Partner at BTG Pactual responsible for Market Infrastructure, framed the bank's participation as foundational.
"Taking part in this initiative allows BTG Pactual to contribute directly to applying blockchain technology to the fund market, within a regulated infrastructure and with live transactions," Furtado said. "Mirroring fund shares creates a concrete foundation for future developments while preserving current processes and the official record of the assets."
Ripple's broader Latin American footprint
This deal extends Ripple's institutional infrastructure push in Latin America beyond payments, where the company has historically focused through its On-Demand Liquidity product using XRP for cross-border settlement. A regulated securities depository adopting XRPL for financial asset record-keeping represents a different category of institutional relationship than a payments corridor partnership, since it embeds Ripple's technology directly into core market infrastructure that carries legal weight for asset ownership records. Ripple holds more than 85 licenses globally and has pursued a strategy of building infrastructure relationships with regulated entities across payments, custody, and now securities depository functions, positioning the company as infrastructure for traditional finance institutions.
The initiative was developed within Brazil's existing regulatory framework, without changing participants' legal responsibilities or requiring new regulatory approvals, according to the companies.
Roman Zaika
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