XRPL Commons Hosts 36-Hour NYC Hackathon to Build On-Chain Lending and AI Payments on XRPL

Signup Write New Story XRPL Commons Hosts 36-Hour NYC Hackathon to Build On-Chain Lending and AI Payments on XRPL by Ishan Pandey by Ishan Pandey | @ ishanpandey AI, Web3, Cybersecurity, Startup Funding & Enterprise SaaS. Top Journalist, Analyst & Thought Leadership Media Leader.

AI, Web3, Cybersecurity, Startup Funding & Enterprise SaaS. Top Journalist, Analyst & Thought Leadership Media Leader.

More than 400 builders have signed up to spend 36 hours on October 24 and 25 writing lending apps, yield vaults and AI payment agents for the XRP Ledger in New York, at a moment when tokenized real-world assets have reached about $46 billion on public blockchains and only a small fraction of them earn anything in DeFi. XRPL Commons, the Paris-based nonprofit running the AI and Fintech XRPL Hackathon, has lined up Ripple, the XRPL Foundation, Mastercard, Ledger, AWS and QuickNode behind the event. It has timed the weekend so that winning teams arrive with working products just before Ripple's Swell 2026 conference opens in Manhattan.

DefiLlama counted about $14.1 billion of tokenized real-world assets on public chains on January 1 and $23.6 billion by March 11. Token Terminal put the total near $46.2 billion in late September, a figure that includes about $13.9 billion of US Treasury bills, $10.7 billion of active yield strategies and $6.5 billion of credit funds spread across 35 or more networks. Providers measure the market differently, with rwa.xyz showing $38.6 billion across 39 networks on October 1, yet every series points the same way and McKinsey projects a $2 trillion tokenized asset market by 2030, which frames the current total as the early part of a long climb.

The ledger gives builders more at the protocol level than most layer 1 networks, since token issuance, a native decentralized exchange, automated market makers, escrow and compliance tools such as Credentials and Permissioned Domains all run inside the protocol while Multi-Purpose Tokens handle real-world assets without separate smart contracts. XRPL.org lists more than 14 years of continuous uptime, settlement in three to five seconds, a transaction cost of 0.000011 XRP and more than $1 trillion in value moved. The numbers from RWA.xyz show builders and issuers noticing: the XRP Ledger took in $3.6 billion of tokenized assets from January to early September 2026, ahead of BNB Chain at $2.6 billion, Stellar at $2.5 billion, Solana at $2.2 billion and Ethereum at $1.2 billion.

Its total of $4.4 billion with stablecoins included ranks third behind TRON and HyperEVM. Two issuers, Justoken's JMWH and CRX Digital Assets, account for most of that inflow, which shows how quickly a single large issuance can move the rankings on a network built for it.

Ripple's dollar stablecoin RLUSD supplies the liquidity side of that picture. RLUSD launched in December 2024 backed one to one by cash, cash equivalents and short-term US Treasuries and passed $500 million within seven months. It has since reached a market capitalization of about $2.49 billion in late September, up more than 86% from roughly $1.34 billion at the start of 2026. A lending product needs a stable unit that borrowers and lenders trust. A regulated dollar token minted on the same ledger gives builders that unit without a bridge.

Token Terminal estimates that only 7% to 12% of tokenized assets are used in DeFi, which on a $46.2 billion base implies roughly $3.2 billion to $5.5 billion at work and leaves the rest sitting in wallets and funds as collateral that nobody can lend against. The demand on the other side is proven, because Aave became the first DeFi protocol to issue $1 trillion in cumulative loans in February 2026, holds more than $26.9 billion in deposits and launched Aave Horizon so that institutions including VanEck, WisdomTree and Securitize can borrow stablecoins against real-world assets.

The Lending & Borrowing track is built around that gap and centers on the XRP Ledger Lending Protocol (XLS-66) and Single Asset Vaults (XLS-65), which together would make lending, credit and yield native ledger functions. A Single Asset Vault lets users pool one asset and receive shares that represent their position. The lending protocol builds fixed-term loans on those vaults with credit checks and underwriting handled off-chain while loan creation, repayment and default are recorded on-chain, optionally cushioned by first-loss capital from loan brokers.

Both are amendments, which the network adopts only after validators support them with more than 80% for two continuous weeks. Neither has an activation date yet, so hackathon teams get to build lending apps and vaults against the infrastructure before it reaches mainnet while giving validators working examples to judge the proposals by.

The hackathon is open to new builders and to existing teams, although coverage of the rules says only work completed during the 36 hours counts toward judging, which keeps the field level for people starting from a blank repository. Lending & Borrowing is joined by Agentic Finance, which covers infrastructure that lets AI agents make payments and manage funds on the ledger, by Protocol Innovation for C++ and systems engineers working on amendments, client implementations and tooling as well as by "Why Not," an open lane for any XRPL project that fits none of the others. Protocol Innovation is paired with a three-day Core Dev Bootcamp in New York from October 20 to 22 that feeds engineers straight into the weekend.

Registration runs through the official event page because XRPL Commons has warned that imitation pages have circulated.

More than $40,000 in prizes are on offer, including dedicated bounties from Mastercard, Ledger, QuickNode and AWS. The top teams gain fast-track access to XRPL Commons grants and incubation. Ledger's own pool is $10,000 across three categories and rewards projects in which a Ledger device works as a real trust layer, so a working demo on the XRP Ledger or its EVM sidechain carries more weight than branding. Mentors and judges come from Ripple, the XRPL Foundation, Mastercard, Ledger, QuickNode and AWS among others, which gives teams direct access to the engineers who maintain the infrastructure they build on.

Odelia Torteman, Head of Digital Assets at XRPL Commons, sees an opening for developers to bring proven DeFi models to the XRP Ledger and to build financial applications that have not yet moved on-chain, with native trading, liquidity and tokenization as the foundation and the proposed lending and vault features adding the credit layer that lets XRPL-based assets earn without bridges or custom smart contracts.

David Bchiri, President of XRPL Commons, wants developers to turn those building blocks into working products over a single weekend. He says the organization is looking for promising projects to take beyond the hackathon with continued support through incubation and introductions to partners and investors. The partner group reinforces that aim, since Ripple, Mastercard, AWS, Ledger and QuickNode each bring a piece of what a lending or payments product needs, from stablecoin and payment-network expertise to cloud infrastructure, hardware security and node access.

XRPL Commons, a nonprofit founded in 2023, has incubated more than 70 projects and works with a community of more than 5,000 active builders, including teams such as ReGolda, Blockvault and MobileWallet. Its recent Make Waves buildathon, a 90-day challenge to launch a live app on mainnet, took 171 builders through the program and produced 56 mainnet launches, a rate of about one in three. Four of those teams are going straight into the ninth cohort of the Aquarium incubator, which selected 13 startups from 11 countries this month. Megawatt, winner of the Paris Blockchain Week hackathon, joined that cohort as well, so the pattern for many teams is to build at an event and then keep growing the project inside the program.

Swell 2026 runs October 27 to 29 at The Shed in New York with more than 1,500 attendees and at least 75 speakers expected. For the first time Ripple has merged its institutional conference with Apex, its developer gathering. Teams that finish the hackathon on October 25 therefore walk into a week in which institutions, investors and decision-makers gather in the same city. The builders who arrive with a working lending app, an agent payment flow or a protocol contribution will have the most concrete argument to make about what the XRP Ledger can do once credit and yield sit natively in the protocol.

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