Palisade

Palisade was a London-based wallet-as-a-service (WaaS) company that built enterprise-grade MPC custody and programmable wallet infrastructure for businesses handling stablecoins, cross-border payments, and institutional DeFi — supporting Solana, Ethereum, XRPL, and more than 20 other blockchains before being acquired by Ripple in November 2025.

What Palisade Built

Palisade addressed a real gap for fintechs and enterprises that needed to move digital assets at scale without managing raw private keys. The platform exposed two distinct product layers: Palisade Wallets and Palisade Custody.

Palisade Wallets provided a flexible API that let developers integrate Multi-Party Computation (MPC) wallet technology directly into payment applications, tokenization platforms, and Web3 products. The key selling point was speed: wallets could be created and deployed programmatically in bulk, making the product viable for high-frequency use cases like on- and off-ramps, subscription payment flows, and enterprise treasury operations that require large numbers of segmented wallets to isolate counterparty risk.

Palisade Custody was the regulated, institutional-grade layer. It used Hardware Security Modules (HSM) alongside MPC to ensure that no single party ever held a complete private key. This made the custody layer suitable for corporations and regulated entities that needed demonstrable security guarantees rather than just operational convenience.

Core Security Mechanism

The foundation of Palisade's architecture was MPC key management. Instead of a single private key that could be stolen, compromised, or lost in a single event, the platform split cryptographic keys into fragments ("shards") distributed across independent parties. A threshold of those parties had to co-sign before any transaction could proceed, eliminating single-point-of-failure risk without requiring the operational overhead of traditional multi-signature setups on-chain.

On top of MPC, Palisade layered a zero-trust architecture that required strict identity verification for every user and device attempting access, and a configurable policy engine that let organizations define approval workflows, counterparty whitelists, and transaction limits before funds moved. The platform also integrated WalletConnect, bringing Web3 application connectivity to the managed wallet environment, and launched a Cloud Sign feature in 2024 for streamlined transaction authorization workflows.

Supported Chains and Assets

Palisade's deepest integrations were with XRPL, Ethereum, and Solana. The platform also supported Avalanche and a range of EVM-compatible networks, with the total supported blockchain count exceeding 20 by the time of acquisition.

Solana's relevance to Palisade's thesis was direct: sub-second finality and low transaction costs made Solana a natural fit for the high-throughput payment and stablecoin use cases Palisade was designed to serve. Where other chains introduce latency or cost friction into enterprise payment flows, Solana's throughput made it viable for the on/off-ramp and fund-sweeping operations that Palisade's wallet provisioning infrastructure was built to handle.

Compliance and Regulatory Standing

In December 2022, co-founder Manthan Dave established Palisade Financial SAS in Paris, a PSAN (Prestataire de Services sur Actifs Numériques) registered custodian serving European markets. The platform integrated Know Your Transaction (KYT) tooling and Travel Rule compliance support. An NCC Group penetration test was completed in 2022, providing third-party security validation before onboarding the first enterprise customers into production.

Founding Team and History

Palisade was founded in London in March 2022 by Manthan Dave and Thomas Kiddle, both co-CEOs whose backgrounds converged on Ripple before they went independent.

Manthan Dave spent three years at Ripple (2018–2021) leading the v4 decentralized payments protocol and Ripple's On-Demand Liquidity product, which by the end of his tenure was processing over $1 billion in monthly cross-border payment flows. He subsequently moved to Ava Labs before co-founding Palisade. Thomas Kiddle brought experience from BT, Apple, and Ripple.

The company's early funding came from the XRP Grants Program, followed by a £3 million pre-seed raise. By end of 2022 Palisade had completed its NCC penetration test, achieved French PSAN registration, and onboarded its first production customer.

Acquisition by Ripple (November 2025)

On November 3, 2025, Ripple announced the acquisition of Palisade for an undisclosed amount — its fourth acquisition of 2025, following Hidden Road ($1.25 billion), Rail ($200 million), and GTreasury.

Ripple's rationale was to build an end-to-end institutional infrastructure stack, combining Palisade's wallet provisioning and MPC custody capabilities with Ripple Custody's vault infrastructure and Ripple Payments' global settlement rails. Post-acquisition, Palisade's technology was integrated into Ripple Custody and Ripple Payments. The palisade.co domain now redirects to Ripple's institutional custody product page.

Solana Fit

Palisade's architecture was designed for the operational tempo of modern digital payments — high-frequency, programmable, and compliant. Solana's finality speed and low per-transaction cost made it a natural fit for the on/off-ramp and enterprise payment flows that Palisade's API was built to serve. By supporting Solana as a first-tier chain alongside XRPL and Ethereum, Palisade gave enterprise clients access to Solana's liquidity and throughput within a regulated, MPC-secured custody environment — a combination increasingly relevant as institutional stablecoin volumes move onto the network.