XRPL taps unlimited for bank-level privacy on public blockchains
The XRP Ledger (XRPL), used by blockchain payment company Ripple, is a zero-knowledge infrastructure provider that taps Bordulls to allow banks and asset managers to conduct confidential yet compliant transactions directly on the network.
Borderless CEO Shiv Shankar told Cointelegraph that the design aims to protect factors such as transaction volume, frequency and collateral from public view, while still allowing regulators to audit activity through selective disclosures and role-based access controls.
Seamless integration means that a variety of institutional use cases have historically been challenging to run on fully transparent ledgers. These range from cross-border trade to trade payments, treasury and capital management, over-the-counter positions, tokenized asset issuance and decentralized exchange or credit activity, order flow and positions that are highly sensitive, Shankar said.
For public blockchains, that trade-off between transparency and confidentiality has become a central obstacle to institutional adoption, with banks and asset managers protecting business strategies and customer activity without falling foul of regulatory oversight.
The move puts XRPL in the race to deliver bank-level privacy on public blockchains as institutions push to avoid what Shankar described as a “transparency tax” on fully visible onchain activity.
Privacy competition is promoted by ZK and FHE approaches.
In March, cryptography company Zama integrated its Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHA) stack with its institutional token platform T-REX, using the technology as a layer of encryption for ERC-3643 securities (financial instruments that meet the tokenization standard) on the upcoming T-REX public network.
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Other projects are betting on various flavors of zero-knowledge technology, including zkSync's Prividium environment, which aims to bring private institutional execution to Ethereum with ZK authentication by keeping raw transaction data out of public view.
Shankar said that projects like zkSync require institutions to start their own layer-2s, which involves significant investment and high costs. Bordless, on the other hand, deploys its solutions through smart contracts, which it says allow institutions to “stay where the liquidity is” (on Ethereum) and “get more flexibility in where they deploy their products.”
Shankar said the design aims to replicate the disclosure controls adopted by traditional finance in an onchain environment, rather than forcing institutions to choose between privacy and compliance.
Privacy will move from behavior to core infrastructure.
The release shows how privacy is becoming a feature of infrastructure and token infrastructure rather than an optional extra.
According to data from RWA.xyz, the tokenized asset market reached $29.25 billion in April, up 7.9 percent month-on-month.
As more real-world assets migrate onchain and traditional players experiment with tokenized funds, deposits and securities, pressure is mounting on networks to accommodate both institutional privacy and regulatory oversight.
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