Ripple’s RLUSD gets two boosts as transfer volume drops 25%

Fintech firm Ripple made two moves on Thursday aimed at growing its dollar-backed stablecoin, RLUSD, in a month when transfer volume across the token has dropped by 25%.

The first is Ripple Mint, a platform that lets institutional customers create, redeem, bridge and track RLUSD through a web dashboard or direct integration.

Until now, minting RLUSD — the process of issuing new tokens when a customer deposits dollars — generally meant arranging it directly with Ripple and waiting on a manual issuance process. The APIs let a firm trigger minting and redemption automatically from its own systems and track each transaction from dollar transfer to onchain settlement.

Ripple has also been extending RLUSD beyond the XRP Ledger and Ethereum onto the XRPL EVM sidechain, Base, Optimism, Ink and Unichain, widening the number of networks where the token can circulate.

Separately, Ripple announced late Thursday a strategic investment in Notabene. This compliance network places RLUSD inside its business-payments platform, putting the token in front of institutions positioned to send and receive it.

So, while Mint is designed to make RLUSD simple to create and manage, Notabene is built to get it moving through institutional payment rails.

That gap between issuance and actual usage is exactly the point, because of where RLUSD sits right now. The token has a market value of about $1.5 billion, according to data from RWA.xyz, making it one of the larger regulated stablecoins, though still a fraction of Tether and Circle’s USDC.

Its supply is divided almost evenly between the XRP Ledger, which holds roughly $877 million, and Ethereum at about $643 million.

The trajectory is mixed. Data assessed by CoinDesk shows that RLUSD’s holder count and active addresses have climbed sharply over the past month, up 6% and 70%, a sign the user base is broadening quickly.

But its market cap slipped almost 5% over the same 30 days, and monthly transfer volume fell about 25%, from roughly $14.6 billion to $11 billion. That shows more wallets are holding RLUSD while less money is moving across it. A stablecoin that is accumulating holders but not transactions is being treated more as something to own than something to use.

RLUSD is issued by Standard Custody & Trust, which holds a limited-purpose trust charter from New York’s financial regulator, the compliance credential Ripple leans on to court banks in a market where regulatory clarity has become the main battleground.

Growing a stablecoin’s supply is one challenge. Turning it into infrastructure that institutions run real volume through is the harder one, and Thursday’s launches are Ripple’s bet on the second.