Cicada Partners

Cicada Partners is a financial company focused on on-chain credit risk management, offering institutional stablecoin financing and risk advisory services. It brings traditional credit due diligence, underwriting, and structuring into tokenized assets. Its Tokenized Risk Assessment (TRA) scorecard evaluates issuer risk, loan structure, and legal parameters.

Its core narrative is that about 98% of DeFi yield comes from market mechanisms such as arbitrage, basis trades, looping, points, and liquidity mining, with capital circulating internally rather than funding real activity. Institutional capital has therefore stayed on the sidelines. Cicada attempts to build a credible bridge between on-chain infrastructure and real-world credit underwriting, providing working-capital loans to fintechs and payment companies that operate with stablecoins.

In the past six months, Cicada announced in August 2026 a collaboration with Ripple and Clearpool to build an institutional lending market on the XRP Ledger. Clearpool provides the infrastructure based on XLS-66 and XLS-65; Cicada handles credit origination, underwriting, loan covenant design, and post-disbursement monitoring; Ripple participates as a limited partner on equal terms with other institutional investors, not as a backstop. The effort allows RLUSD holders to access institutional-grade credit via single-asset vaults, with loans denominated in RLUSD. In May, Cicada also shared its work with Tradevu on stablecoin supply-chain financing, highlighting how it manages emerging-market credit risk in a decentralized way.