Ripple’s dollar-backed stablecoin RLUSD has crossed the $2 billion market capitalization threshold, with data from CoinMarketCap showing the token at roughly $2.09 billion on Aug. 26 after a 0.66% daily increase. Ripple confirmed the milestone on Aug. 25, noting the level was first reached during the previous week, less than two years after the stablecoin’s December 2024 launch.
According to Ripple’s latest update, approximately $963 million in RLUSD had been issued on the XRP Ledger, while Ethereum held slightly more at around $1.05 billion. CoinGecko later placed RLUSD’s market capitalization near $2.11 billion, based on a circulating supply of about 2.1 billion tokens. Because RLUSD is designed to maintain a $1 peg, the increase reflects additional issuance rather than price appreciation.
Ripple emphasized that RLUSD was built for real-world utility and enterprise use cases, with demand coming from retail and institutional users. The stablecoin is issued by Standard Custody & Trust Company, a Ripple subsidiary, under a limited-purpose trust charter supervised by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Ripple says each token is backed by cash or permitted cash equivalents held in segregated reserve accounts, including short-term U.S. Treasury bills, government money market funds, overnight repurchase agreements and bank deposits.
Ripple’s transparency page showed $1.981 billion in reserve funds against $1.866 billion of circulating RLUSD as of Aug. 20, before the reported $2 billion milestone. The company publishes monthly independent attestations prepared by Deloitte, though those reports are retrospective and do not offer real-time verification after every mint or redemption.
RLUSD has expanded beyond Ethereum and the XRP Ledger to networks including Base, Ink, Optimism, Unichain and the XRPL EVM sidechain. Ripple is also backing an institutional credit fund with Clearpool and Cicada to issue RLUSD-denominated working-capital loans to fintech and payments businesses, while FXRP gained access to an RLUSD lending vault through Flare and Morpho.
The milestone coincided with renewed buzz around XRP, which saw an explosive price surge of nearly 50% by the end of the same week. However, Ripple’s disclosure does not confirm that RLUSD growth automatically creates equivalent investment demand for XRP. Stablecoin users can hold and transfer RLUSD without maintaining a large XRP position, although XRP Ledger transaction fees and reserve requirements do create some marginal XRP demand.
