Ripple’s RLUSD▲$0.9999 stablecoin reached a market capitalization above $2 billion in less than two years since its launch in December 2024.
Ripple stated on Aug. 25 that the threshold was reached the previous week, following the issuance of nearly $1 billion of circulating RLUSD on the XRP▲$1.13 Ledger. CoinGecko estimated the stablecoin market cap at $2.11 billion later in August.
Because RLUSD is pegged to $1, increases in its market capitalization mostly correspond to a growth in its circulating supply. Around the time of the peg at one billion, there was just under $963 million RLUSD on the XRP Ledger and $1.05 billion on Ethereum, split roughly half-and-half between the two original networks.
Ripple first deployed RLUSD on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum. Ripple later broadened the networks that it supported RLUSD on. The company also mentions Base, Ink, Optimism, Unichain, and the XRPL EVM sidechain.
Although Ripple does not provide real-time supply information for each chain, the majority of RLUSD in circulation at the time of the $2 billion milestone announcement was on Ethereum and XRPL.
Standard Custody & Trust Company issues the RLUSD; a subsidiary of Ripple, it is a limited-purpose trust company regulated by the New York State Department of Financial Services.
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Ripple states that each RLUSD token corresponds to cash or cash-equivalents held in reserve, including short-term U.S. Treasury bills, government money market funds, overnight repurchase agreements and bank deposits, held in segregated reserve accounts.
Ripple’s transparency reports show that on August 20, days before the RLUSD supply passed $2 billion, the reserve was $1.981 billion with $1.866 billion RLUSD in circulation. Reports are done monthly by Deloitte and are retrospective attestations of Ripple’s reserve and issued RLUSD. There is no real-time attestation, and funds are not verified after each mint and redemption.
The company intends their RLUSD to be used for payments, trading, tokenized assets, and institutional finance; Ripple has joined Clearpool and Cicada on a planned institutional credit fund that will provide RLUSD-denominated working-capital loans to fintechs and payments firms.
Separately, Flare and Morpho created an RLUSD lending vault for FXRP to support decentralized lending of the stablecoin.
While these integrations may present new avenues for adoption, Ripple has not disclosed how much of its recent issuance was driven by payments, exchange liquidity, collateral demand, and treasury activity.
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In addition, growing supply of RLUSD on the XRP Ledger does not automatically create additional investment demand for XRP because users can acquire, hold, and transfer RLUSD without needing large amounts of XRP, which are needed to pay transaction fees.
Further metrics for RLUSD being in use would be when we see more issuance and redemptions, higher transfer levels, more supported networks, and updated reserve attestations, as well as sustained increases in external payments and settlement activities outside of just the increase of circulating supply. This is important.
