NEW YORK
Ripple's expanded Swell conference kicks off Oct. 27 at The Shed in Manhattan, running through Oct. 29. The event merges Swell with Apex—a summit for developers, institutions, and investors building on the XRP Ledger—and UBRI Connect, Ripple's academic blockchain research program, into a unified three-day forum featuring more than 80 sessions.
The programming spans three tracks: Institutional, Ecosystem, and Innovation. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, CME Group CEO Terrence Duffy, and Bullish CEO Tom Farley top the speaker lineup. Water.org co-founders Matt Damon and Gary White will also address attendees.
Tokenization takes center stage—sessions will drill into how assets move onto blockchain rails and the mechanics of stablecoins as the connective tissue between traditional finance and digital settlement. Technical deep dives cover security, privacy, and formal verification, the mathematical frameworks used to validate software behavior at scale.
RippleX senior director of engineering Ayo Akinyele and XRP Ledger chief technology officer emeritus David Schwartz will discuss the network's technical trajectory and developer priorities.
Ripple USD, the issuer's stablecoin, anchors institutional-focused sessions. The company outlined how reserve requirements, capital obligations, and regulatory licensing shape stablecoin adoption for payments, settlement, and corporate treasury operations. Standard Chartered launched custody for RLUSD on the XRP Ledger on Oct. 12 from its Dubai International Financial Centre branch, removing a key institutional friction point.
A forthcoming collateral arrangement between Standard Chartered and LMAX Group, an institutional trading venue, will allow eligible RLUSD holdings to be posted as margin without moving tokens off custody rails. The setup lets institutions trade RLUSD value at LMAX while Standard Chartered holds the actual token—a custody-plus-trading model contingent on final documentation, testing, and regulatory sign-off.
