Ripple USD

What it is

Ripple USD (RLUSD) is the dollar stablecoin from Ripple, the payments company best known for its long association with XRP and the XRP Ledger. It launched on global exchanges on 17 December 2024, entering a market dominated by USDT and USDC with a deliberately regulation-first pitch. Each token is designed to hold a value of one US dollar. The memorable fact is its dual citizenship: RLUSD is natively issued on both the XRP Ledger and Ethereum, rather than starting on one chain and bridging to the other.

How it works

RLUSD is issued through a limited purpose trust company chartered and supervised by the New York State Department of Financial Services, which requires the coin to be backed 100 per cent by highly liquid reserves. Ripple states that every token is supported one-to-one by US dollar deposits, US government bonds and cash equivalents, and it publishes monthly attestations from an independent auditing firm confirming the backing. Reserve custody was placed with The Bank of New York Mellon in July 2025. Users mint RLUSD by depositing dollars and redeem it the other way, which is the mechanism that keeps the price at $1: if the token drifts, arbitrage against the redemption window pulls it back.

The story so far

Ripple announced the stablecoin in 2024 as the centrepiece of a push beyond XRP-based settlement, and it has stacked up regulatory approvals since: New York’s NYDFS, recognition by the Dubai Financial Services Authority, and acceptance as a fiat-referenced token in Abu Dhabi’s ADGM. In 2025 Ripple integrated RLUSD into its own cross-border payments product and, according to its newsroom, secured federal approval to establish a national trust bank in the United States. The company has also begun extending RLUSD to layer-2 networks using Wormhole’s token transfer standard. Growth has been steady rather than explosive, and by mid-2026 the coin had crossed $1.5bn in circulation.

Where it stands

As of late July 2026 RLUSD ranks about 48th among cryptocurrencies by market value, with roughly $1.6bn in circulation and the price holding at $1.00, according to CoinGecko. The things to watch are whether enterprise payment flows through Ripple’s network keep lifting supply, how the coin fares under the maturing US stablecoin rulebook, and the widening spread of chains it runs on. RLUSD’s fortunes are also worth reading alongside those of XRP itself, covered in our XRP page, since both sit inside Ripple’s regulatory story. A stablecoin’s job is to be boring, and so far this one has been; none of this is investment advice.