RLUSD is Ripple's U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, launched on December 17, 2024, and issued under a New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) Trust Company Charter. It is pegged 1:1 to
RLUSD is Ripple's U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, launched on December 17, 2024, and issued under a New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) Trust Company Charter. It is pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar, fully backed by cash and short-term U.S. Treasuries, and runs natively on both the XRP Ledger (XRPL) and Ethereum.
As of late May 2026, RLUSD has surpassed $1.7 billion in market capitalization, reaching an all-time high of approximately $1.88 billion, making it one of the fastest-growing regulated stablecoins since launch.
RLUSD is a fiat-backed stablecoin, meaning every token in circulation is supported by an equivalent amount of U.S. dollars or cash equivalents held in reserve. The reserve is segregated, meaning those assets are kept separate from Ripple's own funds, a requirement under NYDFS rules.
Ripple publishes monthly third-party attestations of the reserve, giving users and institutions a regular, independent confirmation that every RLUSD token is covered. In July 2025, Ripple appointed BNY Mellon, the oldest bank in the United States and a firm that manages over $53 trillion in assets under custody and administration, as the primary reserve custodian. BNY Mellon also handles fiat conversion and settlement operations, which are essential for institutions using RLUSD in cross-border transactions.
On the technical side, RLUSD's Ethereum deployment uses the Universal Upgradeable Proxy Standard (UUPS). UUPS is a smart contract design pattern that separates a contract's logic from its data storage. This means Ripple can deploy security patches or feature upgrades without requiring users to migrate to a new token address, a meaningful advantage for a long-term institutional asset.
RLUSD was not built for everyday retail use. Unlike USDT or USDC, which are widely used for crypto trading and peer-to-peer transfers, RLUSD was purpose-built for enterprise payments, institutional liquidity management, and cross-border settlement. Its regulatory framework reflects this focus.
Key distinctions include:
Raghuram Rajan, former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and an RLUSD advisor, has said that stablecoins like RLUSD "could become the backbone of private payments by offering a secure, scalable, and efficient alternative to traditional systems."
RLUSD lives on the XRP Ledger and operates alongside XRP, but the two assets serve distinct functions. XRP acts as the bridge asset in Ripple's On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) product, converting between currencies in seconds for cross-border payments. RLUSD, by contrast, provides a stable dollar-denominated asset for the settlement and liquidity legs of those same transactions.
In late October 2025, Ripple announced a pilot with Mastercard, WebBank, and Gemini to settle credit card transactions using RLUSD directly on the XRPL, unveiled at Ripple's annual Swell conference. The setup allows purchases made with a Gemini-branded credit card to settle between Mastercard and WebBank on-chain, replacing a traditional process that can take one to three days with near-instant finality.
On May 6, 2026, JPMorgan, Mastercard, and Ondo Finance used RLUSD to settle a cross-border tokenized U.S. Treasury transaction in real time. XRP's role in that deal was limited to paying the network transaction fee, which sits at 0.00001 XRP per transaction.
BlackRock has integrated RLUSD as a redemption mechanism for its BUIDL tokenized fund. LMAX Group, which processed $8.2 trillion in institutional volume in 2025, accepted RLUSD as core collateral for banks, brokers, and buy-side institutions. OKX listed RLUSD across more than 280 trading pairs and authorized it as institutional-grade margin collateral in April 2026.
As of mid-2026, approximately 82% of RLUSD's circulating supply sits on Ethereum, with the remaining 18% on the XRP Ledger. That distribution reflects where institutional counterparties and DeFi infrastructure currently operate. However, XRPL's share has been growing.
In May 2026, Ripple executed the largest single RLUSD mint in XRP Ledger history, issuing 200 million RLUSD in one transaction from the RLUSD Treasury, bringing the XRPL supply to approximately $660 million. Ripple executive Reece Merrick has said he expects RLUSD volume on the XRPL to eventually overtake its Ethereum share, citing the ledger's speed and near-zero fees as key draws for institutions moving past the pilot stage.
This is a question analysts are actively debating. Ripple's official position is that RLUSD and XRP are complementary: XRP handles liquidity and bridging, while RLUSD handles stable settlement. Jack McDonald, SVP of Stablecoins at Ripple, has confirmed this framing, describing RLUSD as a gateway asset with XRP serving as the liquidity layer.
However, some market analysts have pointed out that RLUSD's rapid growth has not translated into XRP price appreciation. Ripple signed ten major institutional partnerships in 2026 alone, including Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, JPMorgan, and Mastercard's network that processes over $9 trillion annually. In most of those deals, settlement ran through RLUSD rather than XRP.
XRP collects a small transaction fee in each case, but does not serve as the primary settlement asset. XRPL burns only 0.00001 XRP per transaction, and only about 14 million XRP have been burned since 2012 out of a 100 billion total supply, so even a major shift in RLUSD activity toward the XRPL will not move the XRP price through fee burns alone.
RLUSD has cleared regulatory hurdles in several jurisdictions:
Ripple Payments, which has processed over $95 billion in cumulative volume across more than 90 markets, integrated RLUSD into its payment rails in early 2025. The service covers 90% of the daily foreign exchange market, providing a wide foundation for institutional adoption.
In December 2025, Ripple began pilot testing RLUSD on Ethereum Layer-2 networks via Wormhole's Native Token Transfer (NTT) standard. NTT is an interoperability protocol that allows a token to move natively across chains without being wrapped or bridged, which reduces the risk of bridge-related exploits. Testing began on Optimism, Base, Ink, and Unichain. A full public rollout is pending regulatory approval from the NYDFS, with Ripple targeting a 2026 launch.
This multichain push is a direct response to where institutional and decentralized finance (DeFi) activity is concentrating. By making RLUSD available on high-throughput L2 networks, Ripple is reducing friction for developers and institutions that operate across multiple blockchain environments. RLUSD transfer volume hit $18.4 billion in Q1 2026, the highest quarter on record, according to Token Terminal data, suggesting that demand for the stablecoin across chains is already building ahead of that broader rollout.
RLUSD is a regulated, fiat-backed stablecoin issued by Ripple under NYDFS oversight, backed 1:1 by U.S. dollar reserves held at BNY Mellon, and redeemable at face value for U.S. dollars. It runs natively on both the XRP Ledger and Ethereum, with approximately 82% of supply currently on Ethereum and a growing share on the XRPL.
With a market cap that reached an all-time high of $1.88 billion in May 2026, regulatory clearances across the U.S., UAE, Bahrain, and Japan, and institutional integrations that include BlackRock, JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and Mastercard, RLUSD has established itself as an enterprise-grade settlement asset within 18 months of launch. Its relationship with XRP is technically complementary but structurally complex: XRP collects network fees while RLUSD handles dollar-denominated settlement, and whether that balance shifts toward more direct XRP demand depends on how future payment products are structured and regulated.
