Vision for Privacy on XRP Ledger

In a recent Insights post, Senior Director of Engineering at Ripple, Ayo Akinyele, shares his vision for privacy on the XRP Ledger.

According to Akinyele, institutional DeFi is still in its early stages, with numerous trillions of dollars in assets expected to transition on-chain over the next decade. He believes that zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) will be pivotal in facilitating private, compliant transactions while also enhancing scalability.

> “Without privacy, financial institutions cannot safely use public ledgers. Without accountability, regulators cannot sign off. With programmable privacy, we can have both.”
> — Ayo Akinyele, Ripple
>
> Meet J. Ayo Akinyele @ja_akinyele, cryptographer and RippleX Senior Director of…
> — RippleX (@RippleXDev) October 2, 2025

Akinyele addresses the misconception that privacy and regulation are at odds, asserting that they complement one another. Tools for confidentiality, like ZKPs, will enable institutions to protect sensitive information from competitors while ensuring compliance with regulatory standards through cryptographic evidence.

He also shared his vision for 2026, predicting the arrival of confidential Multi-Purpose Tokens (MPTs), which will introduce privacy-preserving tokenized collateral. This will be a crucial step for institutional adoption of tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) and DeFi.

Privacy with Accountability: The Next Frontier for ZKPs

The XRP Ledger community is currently prototyping ZKP integrations through research and development (R&D) and compliance teams, in collaboration with partners like Hidden Road.

The first application under development is confidential MPTs, expected to launch in Q1 2026. These tokens will facilitate privacy-preserving collateral management, a vital requirement for the institutional adoption of tokenized finance.

XRP Ledger is crafting a roadmap for privacy tools aimed at promoting wider institutional adoption in tokenization and credit, with the confidential MPTs project marking the initial milestone.

The MPT standard went live on the XRP Ledger mainnet on October 1, as reported.