RLUSD has grown to $1.56 billion in 14 months with 515,000 transactions and $3.5 billion in adjusted volume over the last 30 days, while the XRP price has dropped 62% from its $3.65 high to $1.37.
Roughly 82% of RLUSD’s supply sits on Ethereum rather than the XRP Ledger, meaning the fees, activity, and composability it generates don’t benefit the XRP token much.
XRPL burns just 0.00001 XRP per transaction, and only about 14 million XRP have been burned since 2012 out of 100 billion total supply, so even a major shift in RLUSD activity toward XRPL won’t move the XRP price through fee burns alone.
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RLUSD has hit $1.56 billion in market cap, driven by Deutsche Bank’s integration of Ripple’s payment infrastructure and SBI Japan’s Q1 2026 rollout—and the $2 billion market cap milestone is on course to hit within the coming weeks.
Moreover, BlackRock is using RLUSD as a redemption mechanism for its BUIDL tokenized fund. LMAX Group has also made it a core collateral asset for banks, brokers, and buy-side institutions across spot crypto, perpetual futures, and CFD trading. Every one of those RLUSD adoption should be a genuine win for Ripple and the whole XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) ecosystem, but the XRP price hasn’t followed.
XRP sits at $1.37 after steadily declining since January, and as things stand, about six out of every ten holders are underwater. Ripple’s infrastructure is gaining traction more than at any point in its history, yet the token that was supposed to benefit from that adoption keeps falling. As banks settle payments with a dollar-pegged stablecoin, will the XRP price ever benefit from Ripple’s payment rails over RLUSD?
RLUSD launched in December 2024 under a New York DFS trust charter, which is the same regulatory framework that governs banks. It crossed $1 billion in market cap within the first year, recording 1,278% year-to-date growth, and has since climbed to $1.56 billion. RLUSD’s transaction volume has hit 515,000 in the last 30 days, with its adjusted transaction volume reaching $3.5 billion. Ripple’s stablecoin head, Jack McDonald, has said that RLUSD’s growth is even outpacing internal projections.
Ripple has spent close to $3 billion on acquisitions to build the infrastructure feeding RLUSD’s growth. Hidden Road gives Ripple a prime brokerage arm, Rail handles cross-border stablecoin payments, and GTreasury plugs directly into Fortune 500 treasury operations. Each deal was built to move institutional money through Ripple’s ecosystem, and RLUSD is the product sitting at the center of that flow.
XRP peaked at $3.65 in July 2025 and has been falling since, dropping 62% to $1.37 as of mid-March 2026. In that 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 stablecoins ever launched. Banks are adopting Ripple’s infrastructure at a record pace, but the money is flowing into the stablecoin, not XRP, and that’s one of the reasons Ripple’s successes haven’t impacted the XRP price so far.
Panchenko Vladimir / Shutterstock.com ·Panchenko Vladimir / Shutterstock.com
XRP serves as the bridge asset in Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity product, converting between currencies in seconds so banks don’t have to pre-fund accounts on the other side of the world. That function is the core of XRP’s value proposition, and RLUSD is now doing a version of the same job without the volatility.
When a bank can settle cross-border payments using a stablecoin that holds its $1 peg through any market conditions, unlike the drawdowns XRP has been experiencing, they’d rather opt for the stablecoin. RLUSD’s value remains the same always, and banks never have to think about price risk during transactions.
There’s also a problem with how ODL creates demand for XRP. When institutions use XRP as a bridge, they buy it and sell it almost simultaneously. The buy order is immediately matched by a sale at the destination. Every transaction creates volume, but not lasting demand, because the token is passed through rather than held. RLUSD works differently as 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.
Roughly 82% of RLUSD’s circulating supply sits on Ethereum, with only 18% on the XRP Ledger. Ethereum already had deep dollar liquidity, mature DeFi infrastructure, and far more venues for swaps, leverage, and yield when RLUSD launched.
XRPL’s protocol-level AMM only went live in 2024, and RLUSD pools on the ledger still suffer from shallow depth. The fees, activity, and composability that RLUSD generates on Ethereum don’t touch XRP at all. XRP holders don’t earn revenue from RLUSD, and the 82% of supply living on a different chain is money flowing through Ripple’s ecosystem that bypasses XRP entirely.
Over 300 institutions sit on RippleNet, but only about 40% of them actively use XRP for settlement. RLUSD could change that ratio over time. Banks that adopt RLUSD for treasury management or collateral are already operating inside Ripple’s infrastructure, and from there, ODL with XRP is a shorter step than it would be for a bank starting from scratch. RLUSD doesn’t need to replace XRP to help it—it just needs to keep pulling banks deeper into Ripple’s ecosystem, where XRP is the next product available for corridors that need real-time currency conversion.
ODL processed roughly $1.3 billion in cross-border payments in Q2 2025, up 41% year-over-year, and cumulative Ripple Payments volume has surpassed $95 billion as of January 2026. Both products are running simultaneously in the same corridors, which means at least some of Ripple’s partners are using RLUSD for stable settlement and XRP for bridging rather than picking one over the other.
Right now, most of RLUSD sits on Ethereum because that’s where stablecoin infrastructure is more mature. Ripple executive Reece Merrick has said he expects RLUSD volume on XRPL to eventually overtake Ethereum, pointing to the ledger’s speed and near-zero fees as the draw for institutions moving past the pilot stage. If that happens and even a third of RLUSD’s supply moves to XRPL, that’s hundreds of millions in stablecoin liquidity deepening the ledger’s markets, generating transaction fees paid in XRP, and making XRPL a more attractive settlement layer for ODL. That’s the path where RLUSD’s growth feeds directly into XRP demand rather than bypassing it.
The number to watch is RLUSD’s supply split between Ethereum and XRPL. If XRPL’s 18% share grows quarter over quarter, that means institutional activity is moving toward XRP’s native ecosystem and RLUSD is doing what Ripple says it will. But if Ethereum’s share keeps widening while ODL stays flat, RLUSD’s growth won’t translate into any meaningful support for the XRP price.
Moreover, XRPL routes every on-ledger currency exchange through XRP automatically, and every transaction burns a small amount of XRP as a fee. But that fee is 0.00001 XRP per transaction, and a million transactions only burns about 10 XRP. Total XRP burned since the ledger launched in 2012 is roughly 14 million out of 100 billion.
Even if RLUSD shifts heavily toward XRPL and transaction counts surge, the burn mechanism as it’s currently built won’t be what moves the XRP price. For RLUSD to actually help XRP, it needs to drive real settlement volume through ODL, and command higher transaction fees enough to leave an impact on XRP.
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