Ripple is betting that the next big use for RLUSD will have less to do with crypto traders and more to do with the people moving money inside global companies.
The stablecoin issuer is targeting corporate treasuries and finance teams that collectively handle around $13 trillion in transactions each year, according to Jack McDonald, Ripple’s senior vice president of stablecoins.
The opportunity comes through Ripple Treasury, the business created around Ripple’s $1 billion acquisition of treasury-management software provider GTreasury last year. The platform serves roughly 1,200 corporate treasurers and CFOs, giving Ripple a direct line into companies that already move money between countries, subsidiaries and domestic accounts.
“That customer base hadn’t been onchain,” McDonald told CoinDesk. “They touch roughly 13 trillion dollars worth of transactions on an annual basis.”
For Ripple, that makes the corporate finance department look less like an old-economy corner of business and more like a giant pool of potential blockchain activity.
RLUSD is still a relatively small player next to Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC. But its growth has accelerated. Its circulating supply has reached $2.4 billion, up more than 50% in the past month, according to Token Terminal data.
Roughly $1 billion of that supply is on the XRP Ledger, while another $1.4 billion sits on Ethereum.
Ripple is less interested in the size of that number than in what people actually do with the token. “What’s more exciting to us is the utility and the daily activity,” McDonald said.
That activity has picked up sharply. McDonald said RLUSD’s daily activity rose to about $750 million last month, more than triple the roughly $200 million seen at the start of the year.
RLUSD Wants to Be Financial Plumbing, Not Just Another Token
Payments and capital markets are currently at the center of Ripple’s strategy.
RLUSD has become the primary stablecoin used in Ripple’s payments business, while financial firms can use it for the cash side of transactions, settlement and collateral. That puts the token in places where speed and movement of money matter more than speculative trading.
Ripple has also worked with Franklin Templeton and DBS on tokenized money-market funds and lending. RLUSD can be used as collateral through Ripple Prime, the institutional brokerage operation built following Ripple’s acquisition of Hidden Road.
The broader ambition is clear: Ripple wants RLUSD connected to payments, custody, trading and institutional finance rather than operating as an isolated stablecoin product.
“What we’re seeing […] is this evolution from stablecoins being a crypto asset to [become] part of financial infrastructure,” McDonald said.
That shift mirrors the wider growth of stablecoins. More than $300 billion worth are now in circulation, while banks, fintech companies and payment providers are increasingly building products around them. Governments are also introducing rules that could make their use in mainstream finance easier to structure.
Ripple is now looking beyond the US market, too.
Europe is a major target, with the company seeking to offer RLUSD through a dual-issuance structure designed to comply with the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets framework, or MiCA.
McDonald said the company’s first priority is to make the dollar-backed token available in Europe, although getting the dual-issuance structure approved will take time.
Ripple has already secured regulatory authorization in Luxembourg, which McDonald said could support a broader MiCA-compliant business spanning stablecoins, payments, custody and trading.
There is also a currency preference worth noting. Despite growing interest in euro-backed and emerging-market stablecoins, Ripple says demand remains heavily concentrated around dollar-denominated tokens.
That helps explain why RLUSD is sticking with the greenback even as the stablecoin sector broadens.
Ripple also sees the rise of bank-issued deposit tokens as evidence that financial institutions are increasingly comfortable with money represented on blockchain networks. McDonald’s distinction is where the two models differ.
Deposit tokens can make sense inside a bank or a closed consortium. Stablecoins become more useful when money needs to move beyond those internal networks.
“When you want to go outside of that walled garden, that’s where stablecoins come into play,” he said.
RLUSD is expanding onto more networks as demand develops. Ripple has added, or received approval to use, chains including Base, Ink, Optimism and Unichain.
But the company is deliberately resisting the idea that every possible blockchain needs a version of its stablecoin.
“We want to be where demand is,” McDonald said. “We’re not chasing retail meme coin chains.”
That may be the most revealing part of Ripple’s strategy. RLUSD is being positioned less as a token trying to win attention and more as a piece of financial infrastructure trying to disappear into the machinery of corporate payments, settlement and treasury management.
The $13 trillion opportunity is still an ambition, not money already flowing through RLUSD. But Ripple is betting that putting stablecoins where businesses already move cash could prove more important than winning the next wave of crypto traders.