Ripple has made a strategic investment in Africa’s largest fintech startup, Flutterwave, as part of a Series E funding round that values the company at $3.2 billion. The partnership, announced in June 2026, will see RLUSD, Ripple’s dollar-pegged stablecoin, Ripple Payments, and the XRP Ledger (XRPL) directly integrated into Flutterwave’s payments infrastructure, which already processes over $50 billion in transaction volume across 34 African countries.
Flutterwave has been building a robust stablecoin platform for years, now live with select merchants and in trials for its Send App remittance service. By embedding RLUSD as a settlement asset, the companies aim to slash settlement delays and foreign-exchange costs in Africa’s massive cross-border and remittance market. Flutterwave’s founder emphasized that the collaboration will deliver “faster and cheaper international payments for African businesses,” while Ripple’s Managing Director for Middle East and Africa noted that stablecoins are now integral to payment infrastructure.
On the DeFi side, cross-chain routing protocol Squid has integrated RLUSD, enabling single-transaction swaps across more than 100 blockchains and over 20,000 tokens. Squid uses an intent-based routing system where market makers fill orders on destination chains, removing the need for manual bridging or wrapping. This integration, combined with Wormhole’s Native Token Transfer standard, extends RLUSD’s reach to Ethereum Layer 2s like Base, Optimism, and Unichain. Ripple’s stablecoin product lead said the Squid integration “opens up a lot for payments, DeFi, and treasury use cases,” and Ripple participated in Squid’s $6M funding round last month.
RLUSD, launched in December 2024 under a New York DFS license, has a market cap of around $1.65 billion and has expanded to over 40 networks. It trails USDT ($186.5B) and USDC ($75B), but its growth trajectory is accelerating. Despite these developments, XRP fell -3.7% to $1.16, erasing most 10‑day gains. Analysts note that RLUSD volume growth could drive XRP demand as the native asset on the XRP Ledger, though real price impact depends on sustained adoption beyond pilots.
