Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin exceeded $2bn in market capitalisation last week, less than two years after its launch in December 2024, with almost $1bn of its circulating supply issued on the XRP Ledger.
Ripple announced the milestone on 25 August. CoinGecko subsequently estimated RLUSD’s market capitalisation at about $2.11bn, based on a circulating supply of approximately 2.1 billion tokens.
RLUSD is designed to maintain a value of $1, meaning changes in its market capitalisation generally reflect changes in the number of tokens in circulation rather than an increase in the token’s price.
The stablecoin was originally launched on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum. Data recorded around the time of the milestone showed about $963m of RLUSD on the XRP Ledger and approximately $1.05bn on Ethereum.
Ethereum therefore held a slightly larger share of the total supply when RLUSD’s market capitalisation moved above $2bn. Ripple’s statement that “close to $1B” had been issued on the XRP Ledger was broadly consistent with the available ledger data.
Ripple has since added more networks to RLUSD’s distribution. Its current documentation lists Base, Ink, Optimism, Unichain and the XRPL EVM sidechain, as well as Ethereum and the XRP Ledger.
The documentation does not give a live breakdown of the supply held on every supported network. At the time of Ripple’s announcement, Ethereum and the XRP Ledger still represented most of the circulating RLUSD.
Reserves and oversight
RLUSD is issued by Standard Custody & Trust Company, a Ripple subsidiary operating under a limited-purpose trust charter supervised by the New York State Department of Financial Services.
Ripple says each token is backed by cash or permitted cash equivalents held in segregated reserve accounts. The eligible assets include short-term United States Treasury bills, government money market funds, overnight repurchase agreements and bank deposits.
Ripple’s transparency page reported $1.981bn in reserve funds against $1.866bn of circulating RLUSD on 20 August. That snapshot was published before the company reported that the stablecoin had passed the $2bn market-capitalisation mark.
The company publishes monthly independent attestations prepared by Deloitte. Those reports are retrospective, however, and do not provide real-time confirmation of reserves after every minting or redemption transaction.
Ripple is positioning RLUSD for use in payments, trading collateral, tokenised assets and institutional finance. It has also supported plans for a credit fund that would provide RLUSD-denominated working-capital loans to fintech and payments companies.
As crypto.news reported, Ripple joined Clearpool and Cicada to develop an institutional RLUSD credit fund. The product is still being developed, and its planned size has not been disclosed.
Elsewhere, FXRP gained access to an RLUSD lending vault through Flare and Morpho, creating another potential use for the stablecoin in decentralised lending.
Those partnerships could provide additional sources of demand for RLUSD. Ripple has not published figures showing what proportion of the recent supply increase came from payments, exchange liquidity, collateral use or internal treasury activity.
XRP Ledger impact
Transactions involving RLUSD on the XRP Ledger require small XRP fees. However, increased stablecoin issuance does not automatically translate into equivalent demand for XRP as an investment.
Users can hold and transfer RLUSD without keeping a large XRP balance. The XRP Ledger’s reserve and transaction-fee requirements create some demand for XRP, but that demand may remain limited compared with the asset’s total supply and wider trading market.
Ripple said RLUSD “is just getting started”, a forward-looking statement from the company rather than a measurable forecast.
The next indicators to monitor include monthly issuance, redemption activity, transfer volumes, the distribution of RLUSD across networks and future reserve attestations. A sustained increase in external payments and settlement activity would provide stronger evidence of adoption than supply growth alone.
Ripple has not announced a deadline for its next network expansion or set a target for RLUSD’s future supply.
