Jack McDonald, SVP Stablecoins at Ripple, has said that they are pleased to mark the 1-year since the launch of $RLUSD. They have gone from 0 to trying to become a top 5 USD stablecoin in a short period of time. According to McDonald, here are are some of the key milestones that defined the journey so far.
The $1B+ milestone: RLUSD officially crossed a $1B market cap in November 2025 – one of the steadiest climbs in the regulated stablecoin space.
Demand for trust is real along with a compliance first approach.
As widely reported, the OCC has now conditionally approved Ripple’s national trust bank charter.
By pairing federal oversight with our NYDFS license, they’re “building the gold-standard for enterprise-grade stablecoins.”
Some other highlights shared by McDonald are:
- Institutional infrastructure: BNY was selected to custody RLUSD reserves, further strengthening institutional trust AND attestations by Deloitte for added transparency.
- Bridging RWAs: RLUSD is a 24/7 off-ramp for BlackRock BUIDL and VanEch VBILL tokenized funds via Securitize, deepening its institutional utility. And DBSÂ Bank, FTI Global partnered to enable repo trades for a tokenized money market fund with RLUSD, bringing stablecoins to capital markets.
McDonald added that its makes a global footprint: Beyond the US, RLUSD has secured key recognition in international “hubs like Dubai (DFSA) and Abu Dhabi (FSRA).”
Then there is also the focus on multichain expansion because the future is most likely going to be highly “interoperable.”
Furthermore, they’re expanding to L2s like Optimism, Base, Ink, and Unichain via Wormhole’s NTT standard. They concluded that this “unlocks demand for XRP (wXRP) liquidity across the ecosystem.”
Interestingly, Ripple’s RLUSD joins a growing number of new stablecoins that have been issued. But at this stage in global crypto adoption, the world might not even need nearly as many stablecoins that have been introduced in a hurry it seems to capitalize on the trend. More than likely, we will eventually need many more stablecoins but only when the entire crypto ecosystem has grown considerably larger (perhaps 20x as large as it is today which could be achievable in the next 10 years).