Palisade

Palisade is an enterprise wallet-as-a-service platform that combines multi-party computation (MPC) cryptography with hardware security modules to give fintechs, payments companies, and crypto-native firms programmable control over stablecoin and digital-asset flows at high transaction volumes. In November 2025 Ripple acquired Palisade, integrating its technology into Ripple's institutional custody and payments product suite, where it now operates as Ripple's Wallet-as-a-Service offering.

Origins and Founding Team

Manthan Dave founded Palisade in London in March 2022, expanding into continental Europe with Palisade Financial SAS in Paris in December 2022. The Paris entity registered as a PSAN (Prestataire de Services sur Actifs Numériques) — France's Digital Asset Service Provider classification — giving Palisade a regulatory foothold across the European market before MiCA harmonised the rulebook.

Dave's background is directly relevant to the product he built. He spent three years at Ripple as a staff engineer, leading the v4 decentralized payments protocol on RippleNet and building the On-Demand Liquidity infrastructure that eventually processed more than one billion dollars in monthly cross-border payment flows. From there he moved to Ava Labs, where he reduced Avalanche blockchain sync time from three weeks to roughly 30 minutes. That combined payments and blockchain infrastructure background shaped Palisade's positioning: not a retail wallet, but backend plumbing for businesses that need wallets at scale.

Core Mechanism

Palisade's security model rests on multi-party computation. Rather than storing a private key in one location — a single point of failure — MPC splits key material into encrypted shards distributed across separate parties. No individual shard can sign a transaction alone; a threshold of parties must cooperate. Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) reinforce the model by providing tamper-resistant storage and cryptographic operations at the hardware layer.

This architecture sits inside a zero-trust framework: every access request undergoes strict verification regardless of network origin. Layered on top is a configurable Approvals and Policy Engine that lets businesses define transaction limits, multi-user approval quorums, whitelisted counterparty addresses, and user role hierarchies. The engine enforces these controls programmatically, preventing unauthorized transactions without requiring manual review of every operation.

The entire stack is exposed through a REST API, enabling wallet provisioning, transaction submission, and policy management to be embedded into existing payment or treasury systems without requiring customers to build custody infrastructure from scratch.

Multichain Coverage and Solana Fit

Palisade was built to support multiple blockchains from the start. Its documented network support spans Solana, Ethereum, and the XRP Ledger — a combination that maps directly to the three networks where stablecoin payment volume is most concentrated.

Solana's role in Palisade's stack reflects the chain's position in institutional stablecoin infrastructure. USDC on Solana has become a primary settlement rail for payments companies because of the network's transaction throughput and sub-cent fees. For a platform like Palisade, designed explicitly for high-frequency on- and off-ramp operations and real-time settlement, Solana support is not peripheral — it is the chain where payment velocity requirements are highest and where programmable wallet infrastructure delivers the most measurable operational advantage.

Key Features

Wallet provisioning at scale. The API allows businesses to spin up wallets rapidly for end customers or internal treasury accounts without running their own key management infrastructure.

AML compliance tooling. Built-in compliance features address anti-money laundering requirements, reducing the compliance engineering burden for fintechs operating in regulated markets.

Token issuance. The platform supports token issuance operations, extending its utility beyond pure custody to stablecoin and tokenized-asset deployment.

Counterparty risk controls. Whitelisted counterparty address management limits exposure to unauthorized destinations, a feature particularly relevant for corporate treasury and payments corridors.

Subscription and real-time settlement. The platform was designed to support recurring payment flows and instant settlement, addressing use cases beyond one-off institutional transactions.

Regulatory Standing

Palisade's PSAN registration in France established it as a regulated entity in a jurisdiction that required formal authorization for digital asset custody services. This compliance positioning made it an accessible partner for European fintechs and financial institutions subject to regulatory scrutiny around digital-asset custody arrangements.

Acquisition by Ripple

On November 3, 2025, Ripple announced the acquisition of Palisade, characterizing it as a complement to Ripple's existing bank-grade vault custody product. Where Ripple's vault targets deep, slower-moving institutional holdings, Palisade's lightweight architecture is optimized for speed — rapid wallet provisioning and high-frequency transaction throughput. The combined offering positions Ripple as an end-to-end custody provider spanning both cold institutional vaulting and fast operational wallets. Ripple noted that the Palisade team would continue operating within the company, and described the acquisition as part of a broader approximately four-billion-dollar investment into the crypto infrastructure ecosystem during 2025, which also included Hidden Road, Rail, and GTreasury.

Palisade's domain (palisade.co) now redirects to Ripple's digital asset custody product page, and the developer documentation has migrated to docs.ripple.com under the Wallet-as-a-Service product. The underlying technology remains live and actively marketed by Ripple to its institutional customer base.