Ripple Links RLUSD Growth to Payments and Treasury Use

Ripple sees the roughly $13 trillion in annual transactions handled by its Ripple Treasury customer base as a major potential growth opportunity for its RLUSD stablecoin. Jack McDonald, Ripple’s senior vice president of stablecoins, discussed the opportunity in an interview with CoinDesk, describing corporate treasury activity as an area that could be brought onto blockchain rails.

RLUSD circulation has climbed to $2.4 billion, up more than 50% over the past month, according to Token Terminal data cited by CoinDesk. Ripple’s approach centers on payments and capital markets, while the company is also pursuing a route to offer the dollar-backed token in Europe through a MiCA-compliant dual-issuance structure.

Ripple Treasury Creates a Distribution Route for RLUSD

The opportunity is tied to Ripple Treasury, the business built around Ripple’s $1 billion acquisition of treasury-management software provider GTreasury last year. The platform’s roughly 1,200 corporate treasurer and CFO customers move money across borders, between subsidiaries and domestically as part of routine financial operations.

McDonald said this customer base had not previously been onchain and handles roughly $13 trillion in transactions annually. He characterized the opportunity as substantial, while the figure represents existing transaction activity rather than committed RLUSD volume. The potential for Ripple is to connect an established base of corporate financial activity with its digital-dollar product and related infrastructure.

That focus comes as stablecoins move beyond crypto trading and play a larger role in payments and financial infrastructure. More than $300 billion in stablecoins are in circulation across the market, while governments are establishing regulatory frameworks and banks, payment firms and fintechs are increasingly building around the technology.

Announcement Detail: Payments and Capital Markets Drive RLUSD Use

Ripple has made RLUSD the primary stablecoin in its payments business. In capital markets, the token can be used for the cash leg of transactions, settlement and collateral. These are the two main adoption areas identified by Ripple, and they place the stablecoin within financial workflows rather than treating it solely as an asset for exchange trading.

Ripple has worked with Franklin Templeton and DBS around tokenized money-market funds and lending. RLUSD can also be posted as collateral through Ripple Prime, the institutional brokerage business built from Ripple’s acquisition of Hidden Road. Together, those functions connect the token with payments, capital-markets activity and institutional brokerage services.

McDonald said Ripple places greater emphasis on utility and daily activity than on headline market capitalization. He said RLUSD’s daily activity had more than tripled since the beginning of the year, rising to roughly $750 million a day last month from about $200 million. Ripple views that activity as part of stablecoins’ evolution from crypto assets into financial infrastructure.

The distinction is important to Ripple’s strategy. Supply figures show the scale of tokens in circulation, while payments, settlement and collateral uses describe the operational roles Ripple is seeking for RLUSD. The company is combining stablecoins with custody, trading, payments and prime brokerage instead of operating RLUSD as a standalone product focused purely on supply growth.

RLUSD Growth and the Stablecoin Market

RLUSD remains behind established issuers Tether, which issues USDT, and Circle, which issues USDC, despite its recent growth. Its $2.4 billion circulating supply is split across its original networks: about $1 billion is on the XRP Ledger and about $1.4 billion is on Ethereum.

The distribution across the two networks is detailed in recent coverage of RLUSD’s supply split across both networks. Ripple’s broader strategy positions the token as one component of a stack that includes custody, trading, payments and prime brokerage. The GTreasury customer relationships provide a potential connection between that infrastructure and a large volume of existing corporate treasury transactions.

For Ripple, the central question is usage. The company has highlighted the increase in daily activity alongside the growth in circulating supply, framing payments and capital-markets applications as the principal channels through which RLUSD can be used. That differs from measuring progress only through the token’s market capitalization.

MiCA and the Structure of RLUSD’s European Expansion

Europe is another market Ripple wants to open for RLUSD. McDonald said the company would first like to offer the dollar-backed token there through a dual-issuance structure compliant with the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets framework. He said approval for dual issuance is a process.

Ripple has already received regulatory authorization in Luxembourg, which McDonald said could support a broader MiCA-compliant business spanning stablecoins, payments, custody and trading. He also said demand continues to favor dollar-backed stablecoins over euro-denominated or emerging-market currency tokens, a preference that informs Ripple’s product priorities in the region.

Ripple also views bank-issued deposit tokens and stablecoin projects as validation of onchain money. McDonald said deposit tokens can work well within a bank or consortium network, while stablecoins become more useful when value needs to move outside those systems. This distinction aligns with Ripple’s emphasis on payment flows that can operate across different financial arrangements.

Europe, New Networks and the Next Adoption Test

RLUSD is expanding beyond its original homes on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum. McDonald said Ripple has added or received approval for deployment on Base, Ink, Optimism and Unichain. The company is taking a selective approach to network expansion, with McDonald saying Ripple intends to be present where demand exists rather than pursue every available chain.

That approach keeps the focus on the payments and capital-markets uses Ripple has identified as its primary adoption channels. Ripple Treasury’s customer base and its roughly $13 trillion in annual transaction activity provide the company with a large potential distribution opportunity, but the reported figure is not a measure of RLUSD flows. The significance of the strategy rests on whether existing financial workflows can make use of the stablecoin alongside Ripple’s payments, custody, trading and brokerage offerings.

The company is therefore pairing a growing stablecoin supply with an effort to embed RLUSD in institutional services and corporate treasury activity. Its European plans, network expansion and treasury strategy all form part of that wider effort to position the token for financial-infrastructure use.

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