Ripple just made two announcements, each aimed at a different obstacle keeping institutions from using its stablecoin. The first is Ripple Mint, a platform that lets institutions create, redeem, bridge, and track Ripple USD (RLUSD) through code rather than a dashboard.
The second is a strategic investment in Notabene, a compliance network, with RLUSD going into its business payments platform. Both moves show that Ripple is working to widen where RLUSD can be used and who is willing to use it. Here’s what each one changes and how much of it reaches XRP (CRYPTO:XRP).
Ripple Mint Solves RLUSD’s Access Problem
Until now, an institution that wanted RLUSD worked through a web platform where someone logged in and clicked. That works for occasional use, but a bank moving money on a schedule cannot put a person in the loop for every mint, and the platform could not connect to the systems those institutions already run on.
Ripple Mint adds programmatic access alongside the web interface, so RLUSD operations can run inside an institution’s own software. Teams can mint, redeem and bridge through code, pull balances and transaction status the same way, and receive automatic alerts at every stage from fiat receipt through minting to final payout. Every step carries the same reference ID, so a treasury team follows one trail instead of matching a bank statement against a block explorer by hand.
Moreover, bridging now reaches further than it used to, with RLUSD live on Base, Optimism, Ink and Unichain, and Ripple anchored that expansion on the XRPL EVM Sidechain—a version of the XRP Ledger built to run Ethereum-style applications.
Circle has offered institutions the same access to USDC through Circle Mint for years, and it moved further ahead on July 2, when Standard Chartered became the first major global bank to let clients mint and redeem USDC without holding a Circle account. USDC’s supply is around $73 billion against RLUSD’s roughly $1.6 billion, and it is far busier too, turning over its entire supply about 16 times in June and carrying roughly two-thirds of all stablecoin transaction volume that month.Â
Closing the access gap doesn’t change that, but it does take away one reason to pick USDC without thinking about it. However, Ripple Mint is only live for existing RLUSD customers for now, so it makes life easier for exchanges, market makers, fintechs and institutional customers already using RLUSD rather than pulling in anyone new.
The Notabene Deal Solves RLUSD’s Trust Problem
A stablecoin payment goes to a wallet address rather than a named account at a named bank, so an institution sending one has no built-in way to know who controls the other end, even though regulators require it to identify the recipient first. Notabene’s chief executive, Pelle Braendgaard, said every institution he talks to has “moved past whether to use stablecoins” and is now stuck on how to do it safely at scale.
Notabene runs the largest open network for regulated on-chain transactions, built around the Travel Rule, which requires firms to pass sender and recipient details along with a transfer the way banks always have. Its checks run while a payment can still be stopped rather than after it has settled, so an institution confirms who it is paying before committing the money.
Ripple has now plugged into that network, which connects more than 2,300 institutions across over 100 jurisdictions and carries over $2 trillion in annualized volume. When Notabene raised its Series B in November 2024, just over 165 companies used the platform and it had handled close to $500 billion in transaction volume over the prior year.Â
It now serves more than 280 customers, including tier-1 banks and custodians, with four times the annual volume. A network like that cannot be assembled quickly, which is why Ripple bought a stake instead of building a competitor.
While Ripple didn’t disclose the size of its investment, RLUSD is going into Notabene Flow—the company’s business payments platform handling pull payments, recurring payments and invoicing. The two will also look at whether Notabene’s authorization layer can work with Ripple Payments. Jack McDonald, Ripple’s SVP of stablecoin, said institutional adoption “depends on more than efficient settlement rails alone.”
How Much of This Reaches XRP?
The XRP Ledger is now the biggest network holding RLUSD after passing Ethereum in late June, so more of this activity runs on XRP’s own ledger than anywhere else. Every transaction there destroys a small amount of XRP as its fee, though that burn has removed about 14 million XRP since 2012, which is 0.014% of the original supply in fourteen years—it is far too small to move the XRP price.
Ripple Mint makes RLUSD easier to create, but creating more of it does nothing for XRP if that supply never moves. The Notabene deal is the one that could change that, putting RLUSD in front of 2,300 institutions that can send and receive it, with more expected over the coming quarters.
If those institutions start moving RLUSD, most of that traffic would run on the XRP Ledger, since it already holds more of the supply than any other network. Each transfer burns a fraction of a cent in XRP, so heavier use would speed up a burn that has barely registered in fourteen years. Both announcements do far more for Ripple’s stablecoin business than for XRP, and only sustained volume on the ledger would start to change that.
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