Ripple is pointing to Turkey as proof its infrastructure works at scale: Garanti BBVA Kripto now runs Ripple Custody across its full customer base, and RLUSD is live on Turkish platforms including BiLira, Bitlo, and Bitexen. The push rides a licensed regulatory regime built since 2024, as Turkey's retail crypto volume climbed to roughly $40 billion.
Ripple is spotlighting an already-live footprint in Turkey as the country cements its place among the world's largest crypto markets. A Ripple Insights piece published October 5 frames the nation as a practical use-case market driven by currency pressure, not speculative trading. Retail crypto trading volume there rose 7% year-on-year to roughly $40 billion in early 2026. That pushed Turkey from seventh to fifth in a global adoption ranking Ripple cites.
Bank-Grade Custody and RLUSD Rails Now Live
Garanti BBVA Kripto, the digital-assets arm of Turkey's second-largest private bank, already runs on Ripple Custody. What began as a 2023 pilot has since rolled out to the bank's full customer base, covering storage, transfer, and on/off-ramp access for BTC, ETH, and XRP. Ripple says it is the only infrastructure provider to have met the Capital Markets Board's institutional-custodian bar.
On the stablecoin side, Ripple's RLUSD is now available on Turkish platforms including BiLira, Bitlo, and Bitexen. Reece Merrick, Ripple's Managing Director for Middle East and Africa, said regulated dollar-backed liquidity "matters here in a very practical way." Merrick explained the appeal in the Ripple Insights piece: when a market faces currency pressure, people turn to crypto to protect savings rather than to trade.
Turkey's 2024 Crypto Law Set the Stage
Ripple is not entering this market cold. Law No. 7518, passed in July 2024, gave the Capital Markets Board authority over crypto assets. Secondary rules in March 2025 added licensing, minimum capital thresholds, and AML obligations for crypto asset service providers. Custody-specific rules took effect in June 2026, the same month RLUSD landed on local exchanges.
A bank partnership inside a licensed regime is more defensible than an exchange listing in a grey market. Ripple is also building a broader tokenization stack in parallel, a sign its overall infrastructure ambition extends beyond custody alone.
Custody and RLUSD remain distinct product lines, however. Custody is recurring infrastructure revenue tied to one major Turkish bank, while RLUSD competes with USDT and USDC in a lira-pressured market — and neither automatically lifts XRP demand.
Source: CoinGape
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