Ripple keeps winning huge deals with banks and payment giants, but there’s a catch that bothers a lot of XRP holders. Deal after deal settles in Ripple’s dollar stablecoin, RLUSD, while XRP (CRYPTO:XRP) barely gets a mention. And it’s a fair thing to wonder about.
If the company built around XRP keeps reaching for a different token to move money, is the stablecoin quietly replacing the one people actually hold? XRP trades near $1.15 after a rough year, while RLUSD has grown into a $1.6 billion stablecoin in just over a year—so the worry is easy to understand. Here’s what each token actually does, and whether one really is replacing the other.
What XRP and RLUSD Actually Are
XRP is Ripple’s native cryptocurrency, launched back in 2012, and its price floats with the market like any other crypto. Its main job on the XRP Ledger is to act as a bridge asset—the quick middle step that swaps one currency into another during a cross-border payment. Every transaction on the ledger also charges a tiny fee, and that fee is paid in XRP.
RLUSD is a much newer thing. Ripple launched it in December 2024 as a stablecoin, which means it’s built to always be worth exactly $1. It holds the same value as every RLUSD in existence is backed one-for-one by real dollars and short-term U.S. Treasury bills kept in reserve.
The banking giant BNY Mellon holds those reserves, and the accounting firm Deloitte checks them every month. It’s regulated by New York’s financial watchdog, and it’s meant to be the steady dollar that moves inside a payment, rather than the rail the payment runs on.
So, XRP is the rail, and RLUSD is the money that travels on it. They aren’t two versions of the same thing competing for one spot, but two different tools built for two different halves of the same payment.
Why Ripple’s Big Deals Use RLUSD Instead of XRP
Ripple closed two of its biggest expansion deals just last month. It launched RLUSD in Japan with SBI after clearing the country’s financial regulator. Then Ripple made a strategic investment in the African payments giant Flutterwave to run cross-border payments through RLUSD.
In May, JPMorgan, Mastercard, and Ondo Finance settled a tokenized U.S. Treasury trade—government bonds turned into digital tokens—in real time on the ledger. But in all of these deals, RLUSD moved the money, and XRP was only used to pay the transaction fees.
Banks pick the stablecoin because a payment needs to be worth the same at the end of the transaction as it was at the start. When anyone holds XRP for even a few minutes, the price can move against you because it trades like any other crypto. Meanwhile, holding RLUSD has no risks as it’s a dollar the whole way through.
When you’re moving millions, even a small price move costs real money, so the stablecoin gets a nod over XRP, naturally. XRP was never built to be stable, but to be the bridge, and RLUSD was built to be the cash.
That difference is also why RLUSD has grown so fast, from $132 million a year ago to roughly $1.6 billion today. Ripple spent close to $3 billion buying companies that push payments through RLUSD, including the prime broker Hidden Road (now Ripple Prime), the payments firm Rail, and the treasury software company GTreasury.
Why RLUSD’s Growth Actually Needs XRP
With cros-border payment money flowing through RLUSD, it’s easy to assume XRP is being left behind, but that assumption misses how the two tokens actually work together.
On the XRP Ledger, RLUSD can’t actually move without XRP. Every time someone sends RLUSD across the ledger, the fee for that transaction gets paid in XRP and a tiny amount of it gets burned, meaning destroyed for good. And when someone swaps RLUSD for a currency it doesn’t trade against directly, the ledger routes that trade through XRP instead. The stablecoin does the settling, but the token underneath it does the work that makes settling possible.
Until this year, most RLUSD lived on Ethereum. RLUSD on Ethereum pays no fees in XRP and uses no XRP bridge, so all of its growth there did nothing for the token. That has now changed. Over the past six months, RLUSD activity on the XRP Ledger has jumped 40 times over, and for the first time, more than half of all RLUSD is on the ledger rather than Ethereum—up from just 17% in April. The stablecoin that looked like XRP’s replacement now runs most of its traffic on XRP’s rail.
However, only about 14 million XRP have been burned this way since 2012, out of a 100 billion total supply, so the amount taken out per transaction is far too small to matter. All of RLUSD’s activity lifts XRP’s usage, not the XRP price. More trips across the rail mean genuine demand for the token, but that demand shows up in network activity long before it impacts the token’s price.
Is RLUSD Really Replacing XRP?
XRP was originally sold as the bridge asset banks would hold in the middle of a payment, and that job now belongs to RLUSD, because banks want a token that stays at $1 and XRP was never going to be that.
But on the XRP Ledger itself, RLUSD isn’t replacing XRP so much as running on top of it, needing the token for every fee and every currency swap it can’t make directly. And this year, it moved most of its activity onto that rail, so the more it settles on the ledger, the more XRP it puts to work.
After Ripple joined more than 140 firms backing Open USD, a new stablecoin consortium, at the end of June, Ripple President Monica Long said the plan is to grow XRP and RLUSD together. The XRP Ledger as the home for institutions, XRP as the bridge, and RLUSD as the steady dollar for settling payments.
For anyone holding XRP, this is the change that matters. RLUSD’s growth is no longer something to fear—it has become one of the few things on the ledger creating real demand for XRP. The catch is that usage and price aren’t the same thing. XRP can get used a little more every month and still trade flat, and it likely will until the activity on the ledger grows big enough to matter or a bigger catalyst finally arrives.
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