Ripple is aiming its RLUSD stablecoin at corporate treasury teams as it looks for the next stage of growth beyond crypto-native use cases. The company says one of its biggest opportunities sits inside Ripple Treasury, the business built around its $1 billion acquisition of treasury software provider GTreasury last year.
According to Jack McDonald, Ripple’s senior vice president of stablecoins, the platform serves about 1,200 corporate treasurer and CFO customers that collectively handle roughly $13 trillion in annual transactions. Ripple sees that base as a large pool of traditional financial activity that could eventually move onto blockchain-based payment rails.
RLUSD expands but remains smaller than market leaders
Ripple USD, or RLUSD, was launched nearly two years ago and still trails far behind the dominant stablecoins issued by Tether and Circle. Even so, the token has been growing quickly in recent weeks.
Its circulating supply has reached $2.4 billion, up more than 50% over the past month, according to Token Terminal data. Around $1 billion of RLUSD is on the XRP Ledger and about $1.4 billion is on Ethereum.
McDonald said Ripple is paying closer attention to usage than to market capitalization alone. He said RLUSD’s daily activity has more than tripled since the start of the year, rising from roughly $200 million a day to about $750 million a day last month.
Payments and capital markets are the main use cases
Ripple says payments and capital markets are currently driving most RLUSD adoption. The company has made the token its primary stablecoin in its payments business, while in capital markets it is being positioned for the cash leg of transactions, settlement and collateral.
Ripple has also worked with firms including Franklin Templeton and DBS on tokenized money-market fund and lending initiatives. Through Ripple Prime, the institutional brokerage business created from Ripple’s acquisition of Hidden Road, RLUSD can also be posted as collateral.
That approach fits a broader strategy in which Ripple combines stablecoins with custody, trading, payments and prime brokerage rather than treating RLUSD as a standalone product. McDonald described this as part of a wider shift in which stablecoins are becoming part of financial infrastructure, not just crypto trading tools.
Europe is a target for the next phase
Ripple also wants to make RLUSD available in Europe. McDonald said the company’s first preference is to offer the dollar-backed token there through a dual-issuance structure that complies with the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets framework, or MiCA.
He said obtaining approval for that structure is a process, but added that Ripple has already received regulatory authorization in Luxembourg. According to McDonald, that authorization could support a broader MiCA-compliant business spanning stablecoins, payments, custody and trading.
McDonald also said current demand remains concentrated in dollar-backed stablecoins rather than euro-denominated or emerging-market currency tokens.
Next steps include selective network expansion
Ripple argues that the growing number of stablecoins and bank-led tokenized deposit projects validates the role of onchain money. McDonald said deposit tokens may work well within a single bank or consortium, while stablecoins become more useful when funds need to move beyond those closed systems.
RLUSD is expanding beyond its initial presence on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum. McDonald said Ripple has added or received approval for networks including Base, Ink, Optimism and Unichain, though he stressed the company does not intend to launch on every blockchain.
For now, the clearest confirmed next steps are Ripple’s push into Europe under a MiCA-compliant structure and its effort to convert treasury, payments and capital-markets activity from existing enterprise relationships into RLUSD usage.
Source: www.coindesk.com