CSD BR, a Brazilian financial market infrastructure authorized as a registrar, central securities depository and settlement system, has begun recording and auditing financial assets on the XRP Ledger (XRPL), starting with BTG Pactual investment fund shares. The depository reports more than BRL 22 trillion in registered assets and says its existing systems remain the official source of record for registration, deposit and settlement.

The first phase of the partnership with Ripple takes asset tokenization out of controlled testing and into live operation in a real market environment — but with a deliberately narrow scope. CSD BR will tokenize fund shares deposited at the depository and mirror them on the XRPL using the Multi-Purpose Token (MPT) standard. Authorized participants can query and validate the consistency of records transparently and in near real time. The blockchain layer does not replace any existing process.

For desks tracking post-trade plumbing, the distinction matters: this is a mirroring architecture, not a migration. Current processes remain unchanged for investors, issuers and participants, and the model was developed within the existing regulatory framework, with no change to participants' legal responsibilities and no new regulatory approvals required.

What is measured versus asserted

The stated aim of the deployment is to assess, in a regulated environment and with live transactions, the gains in transparency, traceability, automation and efficiency that blockchain vendors routinely claim. Those gains remain, for now, assertions to be tested against operational data. What is concrete at launch: the asset class (BTG Pactual fund shares), the token standard (MPT on XRPL), and the counterparty stack (Ripple custody infrastructure combined with XRPL's native tokenization capabilities).

Access is permissioned. The onchain environment is restricted to corporate and banking clients in Brazil subject to regulatory Know Your Customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) procedures.

CSD BR retains full control over issuance and administration of the assets. Governance and compliance functions preserved in the design include participant authorization mechanisms, the ability to freeze individual assets, and the ability to reverse transactions — clawback — when required by regulatory or judicial order. These controls place the public ledger firmly inside the depository's existing supervisory perimeter rather than outside it.

"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. 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," said Daniel Polano Spreafico, Head of Products and Clients at CSD BR.

Ripple framed the deployment as an industry milestone. "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. This partnership shows how distributed ledger technology can be safely incorporated into critical financial infrastructure in a regulated way," said Silvio Pegado, Managing Director of Ripple for Latin America.

BTG Pactual, the first issuer whose fund shares are being mirrored, positioned its role as contributing to applied blockchain in the fund market. "Mirroring fund shares creates a concrete foundation for future developments while preserving current processes and the official record of the assets," said Luis Furtado, Partner at BTG Pactual responsible for Market Infrastructure.

Next phases: issuance and trading

Once the mirroring phase is validated, the partnership envisions expanding blockchain use to native asset issuance and to trading among authorized participants. Assets under consideration include Real Estate Receivables Certificates (CRI) and Agribusiness Receivables Certificates (CRA), significant segments of Brazil's fixed income market.

The platform's evolution will also include advanced confidentiality mechanisms to meet the privacy requirements of the financial market — an acknowledgment that mirrored ownership data on a public ledger raises confidentiality questions for institutional participants. The initial focus is Brazilian assets and institutions, but CSD BR says the model was designed to allow future expansion to new asset classes, new participants and, potentially, other international markets.

Throughput claims deserve scrutiny alongside the tokenization claims. CSD BR states its infrastructure can process millions of transactions in a matter of minutes; the XRPL layer, in this phase, carries audit and query traffic rather than settlement volume, so the deployment will not stress the ledger's capacity in the way a full issuance-and-trading phase would.

The sequencing is consistent with how other depositories have approached distributed ledgers: mirror first, measure, then extend. Whether the validated mirroring phase converts into native onchain issuance of CRI and CRA instruments — and on what timeline — will determine whether this becomes structural market infrastructure or an auditing appendage.