RLUSD has grown to $1.56 billion in 14 months with 515,000 transactions and an adjusted volume of $3.5 billion in the last 30 days, while the price of XRP has fallen 62% from a high of $3.65 to $1.37.
About 82% of the RLUSD supply sits in Ethereum rather than the XRP ledger, meaning the fees, functionality, and composition it generates do not greatly benefit the XRP token.
XRPL burns only 0.00001 XRP per transaction, and only 14 million XRP have been burned since 2012 out of a total supply of 100 billion, so even a large shift in RLUSD activity towards XRPL will not move the price of XRP through fee burning alone.
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RLUSD has hit $1.56 billion in market cap, driven by Deutsche Bank’s integration with Ripple’s payment infrastructure and SBI Japan’s Q1 2026 rollout—and its $2 billion market cap target is on track in the coming weeks.
Additionally, BlackRock uses RLUSD as a redemption mechanism for its BUIDL tokenized fund. LMAX Group has also made it a prime collateral asset for spot crypto, fixed futures, and CFD trading for banks, brokers, and buy-side institutions. Each of these RLUSD adoptions should be a real win for Ripple and the entire XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) ecosystem, but the price of XRP hasn’t followed.
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XRP is sitting at $1.37 after a steady decline since January, and as things stand, about six out of ten are underwater. Ripple’s infrastructure is getting more traction than at any point in its history, yet the tokens that should take advantage of this option are falling. As banks adjust payments to dollar-pegged stablecoins, will XRP’s price benefit from Ripple’s payments rail over RLUSD?
RLUSD launched in December 2024 under New York’s DFS Trust Charter, which is the same regulatory framework that governs banks. It reached a market cap of $1 billion in its first year, registering 1,278% year-to-date growth, and has since climbed to $1.56 billion. RLUSD transaction volume reached 515,000 in the last 30 days, bringing its adjusted transaction volume to $3.5 billion. Ripple’s head of stablecoin Jack Macdonald said that the growth of RLUSD is even beyond internal estimates.
Ripple has spent nearly $3 billion on acquisitions to build the infrastructure to grow RLUSD. Secret Road gives Ripple a real brokerage arm, Rail handles cross-border stablecoin payments, and GTreasury connects directly to Fortune 500 treasury operations. Every transaction was designed to move institutional money through Ripple’s ecosystem, and RLUSD is the product that sits at the center of this flow.
XRP peaked at $3.65 in July 2025 and has been falling ever since, falling 62% to $1.37 by mid-March 2026. In the same window, RLUSD went from nothing to $1.56 billion, picked up BlackRock, Deutsche Bank, and LMAX as partners, and became one of the fastest-growing emerging markets. Banks are adopting Ripple’s infrastructure at a record pace, but the money is going to the stablecoin, not XRP, and that’s one of the reasons why Ripple’s successes haven’t affected XRP’s price so far.
Vladimir Panchenko / Shutterstock.com ·Vladimir Panchenko / Shutterstock.com
XRP acts as a bridge asset in Ripple’s on-demand liquidity product, exchanging between currencies in seconds so banks don’t need to pre-fund accounts on the other side of the world. This function is core to XRP’s value proposition, and RLUSD now performs a version of the same function without the volatility.
When a bank can arrange cross-border payments using a stablecoin that maintains its $1 peg in any market conditions, unlike the withdrawal XRP is experiencing, they will choose a stablecoin. The value of RLUSD always remains the same, and banks never think about price risk during transactions.
There is also a problem with how ODL generates demand for XRP. When institutions use XRP as a bridge, they buy it and sell it almost simultaneously. The purchase order is immediately matched to the sale at the destination. Each transaction creates volume, but not constant demand, because tokens are floated rather than held. RLUSD works differently because banks hold it, post it as collateral, and use it to manage treasury operations across time zones, which creates demand that actually stays in the system.
Approximately 82% of the circulating supply of RLUSD sits in Ethereum, only 18% in the XRP ledger. Ethereum already had deep dollar liquidity, a mature DeFi infrastructure, and plenty of room for exchange, leverage, and yield when RLUSD launched.
The AMM of the XRPL protocol level only went live in 2024, and the RLUSD pools in the ledger still suffer from low depth. The fees, performance, and composition that RLUSD generates on Ethereum do not touch XRP in any way. XRP holders do not receive income from RLUSD, and 82% of the supply lives in a different chain of money that flows through Ripple’s ecosystem that completely bypasses XRP.
More than 300 institutions sit on RippleNet, but only 40% of them actively use XRP for settlement. RLUSD may change this ratio from time to time. Banks that choose RLUSD for treasury management or collateral are already operating on Ripple’s infrastructure, and from there, ODL with XRP is a short step from scratch for the bank. RLUSD doesn’t need to deploy XRP to help—it just needs to pull banks deeper into Ripple’s ecosystem, where XRP is the next product for corridors that need real-time currency exchange.
ODL processed nearly $1.3 billion in cross-border payments in Q2 2025, an increase of 41% year-over-year, and the total amount of Ripple payments by January 2026 reached $95 billion. Both products run on the same corridors at the same time, which means that at least some of the XRPL shares are used for Ripple and the Steel shares are used for Ripple. Build a bridge instead of choosing one over the other.
Right now, most RLUSD is sitting on Ethereum because that’s where the stablecoin infrastructure is most mature. Ripple CEO Merrick said he expects RLUSD volume on XRPL to eventually overtake Ethereum, citing the ledger’s speed and near-zero fees as a draw for institutions going through the pilot phase. If that happens and even a third of the RLUSD supply moves to XRPL, it deepens ledger markets by hundreds of millions in Stalkcoin liquidity, generates transaction fees paid in XRP, and makes XRPL a very attractive settlement layer for ODL. This is where the growth of RLUSD feeds directly into the demand for XRP rather than bypassing it.
The number seen is the distribution of RLUSD supply between Ethereum and XRPL. If the 18% share of XRPL grows from quarter to quarter, it means institutional activity is moving to the original XRP ecosystem and RLUSD is doing what Ripple says. But if Ethereum’s share expands while ODL remains flat, the RLUSD’s growth will provide no meaningful support for XRP’s price.
In addition, XRPL automatically converts any on-ledger currency into XRP, and each transaction burns a small amount of XRP as a fee. But this fee is 0.00001 XRP per transaction, and a million transactions only burn 10 XRP. Since the inception of the ledger in 2012, the total amount of XRP burned is approximately 14 million out of 100 billion.
Even if RLUSD moves massively towards XRPL and transaction numbers increase, the burn mechanism as it is currently constructed will not be what moves the price of XRP. In order for RLUSD to actually help XRP, it needs to run the original settlement volume through ODL, and command higher transaction fees to leave an impact on XRP.
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