Ripple Targets $13 Trillion Treasury Market With RLUSD — But What Does It Mean for XRP?

here is an awkward question Ripple has had to answer ever since it launched its own dollar-backed stablecoin.

If XRP was designed to move value efficiently around the world, why did Ripple need another digital asset?

That question has become more important as Ripple USD, or RLUSD, moves from an experiment into a potentially significant part of Ripple's institutional financial infrastructure.

Speaking to CoinDesk, Ripple Senior Vice President of Stablecoins Jack McDonald pointed to corporate treasury management as one of the company's biggest opportunities. Ripple Treasury's approximately 1,200 corporate treasurer and CFO customers collectively touch roughly $13 trillion of transactions annually.

That does not mean $13 trillion is about to move through RLUSD. Far from it.

It means Ripple has acquired access to businesses already moving enormous amounts of money through conventional financial systems. If even a small proportion of those flows migrate onto blockchain-based settlement infrastructure, RLUSD could become substantially more important.

And XRP may be standing beside it.

The important word is may.

RLUSD is growing quickly

According to CoinDesk, RLUSD's circulating supply has reached approximately $2.4 billion, rising more than 50% over the previous month. About $1 billion was on the XRP Ledger and roughly $1.4 billion on Ethereum at the time of the report.

Ripple's own latest transparency figures put total circulating RLUSD at approximately $2.396 billion as of September 3, 2026, supported by about $2.518 billion in reserve assets. Ripple publishes monthly independent attestations covering the circulating supply and reserves backing the stablecoin.

But McDonald argues that market capitalisation is not necessarily the most important number.

RLUSD daily activity has reportedly risen from around $200 million at the beginning of 2026 to roughly $750 million per day recently.

That distinction matters.

A stablecoin sitting in a wallet is essentially digital cash sitting in an account. A stablecoin repeatedly used for settlements, collateral, trading and payments starts becoming financial infrastructure.

Ripple appears to be aiming for the second category.

The $13 trillion opportunity

Ripple's move into corporate treasury management accelerated through its acquisition of GTreasury.

Ripple subsequently launched digital-asset capabilities within Ripple Treasury, allowing corporate finance teams to view and manage traditional fiat and digital liquidity within the same treasury-management environment.

This gives Ripple something potentially more valuable than another crypto product: distribution.

Corporate treasurers already need to move money between subsidiaries, currencies, suppliers, banks and jurisdictions. They manage working capital, liquidity and foreign exchange every day.

Ripple does not need to convince these businesses that moving money matters. They already move trillions.

It needs to convince them that moving some of that money using blockchain infrastructure is cheaper, faster or operationally better.

RLUSD is the relatively conservative entry point.

So what exactly is RLUSD?

RLUSD is Ripple's U.S.-dollar-backed stablecoin.

Each RLUSD is designed to maintain a value of US$1 and is backed by reserves including cash, U.S. government securities and other highly liquid assets. Eligible customers can redeem RLUSD for U.S. dollars subject to Ripple's applicable terms.

Unlike XRP, RLUSD is not supposed to appreciate.

If RLUSD works perfectly, one RLUSD purchased today should still be worth approximately one U.S. dollar tomorrow.

That sounds less exciting than a cryptocurrency capable of increasing dramatically in price, but for a corporate treasurer it is precisely the point.

Imagine a company needs to pay a supplier $10 million tomorrow.

The CFO wants to know that the $10 million being transferred is still worth approximately $10 million when it arrives.

Price stability is a feature, not a limitation.

Why didn't Ripple simply use XRP?

This is where the difference between payments technology and treasury management becomes important.

XRP and RLUSD solve different problems.

XRP is a freely traded digital asset. Its market price changes continuously according to supply and demand.

RLUSD is designed to represent a dollar.

A corporate treasury might be comfortable holding $50 million of tokenised dollars for operational purposes. It may be considerably less comfortable holding $50 million of XRP if the money is needed for payroll, supplier payments or another liability denominated in dollars.

Even if XRP can move across the network extremely quickly, its market value can change.

For many businesses that creates an accounting, risk-management and governance problem.

Ripple therefore created RLUSD partly because institutional customers often want the advantages of blockchain settlement without taking cryptocurrency price risk.

Ripple itself described RLUSD at launch as an institutional-grade stablecoin intended to meet growing demand for USD-denominated transactions.

There is another reason.

The world's financial system is still overwhelmingly denominated in fiat currencies.

Businesses keep accounts in dollars.

Invoices are issued in dollars.

Debt is denominated in dollars.

Financial statements measure liabilities in dollars.

Regulators understand dollars.

Stablecoins allow businesses to put those familiar dollars onto blockchain infrastructure without requiring the business to fundamentally change what money it uses.

In that sense, RLUSD is a bridge between traditional finance and blockchain.

XRP is a different kind of bridge.

XRP connects value. RLUSD represents value.

A useful way to understand the difference is this:

RLUSD is digital money denominated in dollars.

XRP is a neutral digital asset that can potentially connect different forms of money and liquidity.

Suppose an American business holds RLUSD and needs to pay a company that ultimately wants euros, Mexican pesos or another tokenised currency.

If there is deep direct liquidity between those two assets, they can potentially be exchanged directly.

But there will not always be deep liquidity between every possible currency pair.

This is where a bridge asset can become valuable.

The XRP Ledger's decentralised exchange can use auto-bridging, which can automatically route trades through XRP when an XRP intermediary pair provides better liquidity or pricing than a direct token-to-token trade.

Conceptually:

RLUSD → XRP → another currency or token

may sometimes be more efficient than:

RLUSD → another currency or token directly.

That does not mean every RLUSD transaction uses XRP.

It does not.

And that distinction is important.

Does every RLUSD payment create demand for XRP?

No.

This is one of the easiest claims to exaggerate.

Someone can transfer RLUSD directly from one wallet to another without first purchasing XRP as the transferred asset.

RLUSD also exists on networks beyond the XRP Ledger. Ripple currently documents RLUSD across XRPL, Ethereum, Base, Ink, Optimism, Unichain and the XRPL EVM sidechain.

An RLUSD transaction occurring entirely on Ethereum does not somehow automatically create substantial XRP demand.

Even on the XRP Ledger, XRP's direct role as the network transaction fee is tiny.

Every normal XRPL transaction destroys a small amount of XRP as its network fee, with the standard minimum currently 10 drops — 0.00001 XRP.

Therefore, the argument that trillions of dollars of RLUSD transactions will cause enormous XRP demand simply because XRP pays XRPL transaction fees is mathematically weak.

The fees are deliberately extremely small.

The potentially important relationship lies elsewhere.

Where RLUSD could increase XRP demand

The strongest long-term XRP argument is not transaction fees.

It is liquidity.

Financial networks become more useful as more assets and more participants enter them.

Imagine an XRPL ecosystem containing:

- RLUSD representing dollars;
- euro stablecoins;
- peso stablecoins;
- tokenised bonds;
- tokenised money-market funds;
- tokenised deposits;
- commodities;
- securities;
- institutional credit products; and
- other real-world assets.

Moving one RLUSD from Wallet A to Wallet B does not necessarily require XRP.

But exchanging thousands of different assets efficiently creates a liquidity problem.

There cannot realistically be an equally deep trading market between every possible pair of assets.

A neutral intermediate asset can reduce that fragmentation.

Ripple has itself described XRP as continuing to provide liquidity and transaction-fee functionality as stablecoins expand across XRPL.

Ripple President Monica Long has previously argued that the XRP Ledger's DEX and automated market maker were designed to use XRP as a bridge asset, with stablecoins potentially contributing additional activity and liquidity to the ecosystem.

That is the more interesting XRP thesis.

RLUSD could help bring money onto blockchain infrastructure.

XRP may help that money move between different assets and currencies.

Think of RLUSD as the passenger and XRP as a possible interchange

Consider an airport.

RLUSD opening a route into an airport does not mean every passenger must connect through the airport's central hub.

Some passengers travel directly to their destination.

But as hundreds of destinations are added, having a highly liquid interchange connecting those routes becomes increasingly useful.

RLUSD could bring more passengers into the XRP Ledger ecosystem.

XRP's long-term opportunity is to become one of the principal interchange assets.

Whether that actually occurs will depend on liquidity, spreads, regulation, market depth and whether XRP provides a more economical route than direct stablecoin pairs.

Technology makes it possible.

Economics determines whether anyone uses it.

RLUSD can also compete with XRP

There is another side to the story that XRP investors should not ignore.

RLUSD does not only complement XRP.

In some situations it can replace a use case where XRP might otherwise have been used.

Ripple has already integrated RLUSD into Ripple Payments and described it as suitable for enterprise cross-border payments.

CoinDesk reports that Ripple now considers RLUSD the primary stablecoin within its payments business.

If a company wants to send dollars from one institution to another and both sides are perfectly happy receiving RLUSD, there may be little reason to introduce XRP into that particular transaction.

It could simply be:

USD → RLUSD → RLUSD → USD

rather than:

USD → XRP → XRP → USD.

That is why claims that RLUSD adoption automatically increases XRP adoption should be treated cautiously.

Sometimes the assets will work together.

Sometimes RLUSD may be used without XRP.

The strategic question is what happens when Ripple's ecosystem grows large enough to involve many currencies, assets and markets simultaneously.

A stablecoin may actually make XRP easier for banks to use

There is also a subtler possibility.

RLUSD could act as a gateway.

For many financial institutions, adopting XRP as the first blockchain asset they encounter requires several conceptual leaps at once.

They must become comfortable with blockchain infrastructure, custody, liquidity, cryptocurrency price risk, compliance and accounting.

RLUSD removes one of those variables.

A dollar-backed token looks much more familiar.

An institution can begin by holding and transferring tokenised dollars.

Once its treasury systems, custody infrastructure and compliance processes operate onchain, using other assets becomes technically much easier.

Ripple appears to be building exactly this broader infrastructure.

RLUSD is being integrated across payments, custody, treasury management, tokenised assets and Ripple Prime rather than being developed as an isolated stablecoin product.

That creates potential indirect value for XRP even where XRP is not involved in the original RLUSD transaction.

Capital markets may become as important as payments

The other major development is that Ripple's ambitions are extending well beyond transferring money.

CoinDesk reports that RLUSD is increasingly being used for the cash side of capital-market transactions, settlement and collateral.

Ripple has worked with DBS and Franklin Templeton on tokenised money-market fund infrastructure in which RLUSD can be used alongside tokenised financial assets.

This matters because the potential blockchain economy is much larger than cross-border remittances.

If bonds, funds, loans, deposits and other assets increasingly become tokenised, they need something resembling cash for settlement.

Stablecoins can fill that role.

Once both the asset and the money exist onchain, transactions that currently take place across multiple institutions and settlement systems can potentially occur within one programmable financial environment.

That is the market Ripple appears to be positioning itself for.

What would $13 trillion mean for XRP?

The honest answer is that nobody can calculate it from the figure alone.

Ripple Treasury customers handling $13 trillion annually does not mean:

- $13 trillion will move through RLUSD;
- $13 trillion will move through XRPL;
- $13 trillion will pass through XRP; or
- XRP's market capitalisation needs to equal some percentage of $13 trillion.

Those would be unjustified assumptions.

Instead, think of the $13 trillion figure as the size of an existing financial-flow network Ripple now has an opportunity to address.

Suppose only 1% eventually migrated to blockchain infrastructure.

That would still represent $130 billion of annual transaction activity.

At 5%, it would be $650 billion.

Those figures are illustrations, not forecasts.

And even then, the proportion requiring XRP would depend on how transactions were routed.

The more important question is therefore not:

How much RLUSD exists?

It is:

How much economic activity eventually takes place inside an ecosystem where XRP is the cheapest or most liquid route between assets?

That is much harder to measure — but far more relevant to XRP's long-term utility.

Why Ripple probably needs both assets

Ripple's strategy makes more sense when XRP and RLUSD are viewed as complementary tools rather than competitors fighting for the same job.

RLUSD provides:

price stability, dollar denomination, institutional familiarity and regulated issuance.

XRP provides:

a neutral native asset, open-market liquidity, potential cross-currency bridging and the underlying native asset of XRPL.

You would not use a hammer for every job simply because you own a good hammer.

Financial infrastructure is similar.

A corporate treasurer may want RLUSD for holding working capital.

A market maker may use XRP when moving between liquidity pools.

A tokenised securities platform may settle the cash portion in RLUSD.

Another international payment could use XRP as an intermediate asset.

Ripple's long-term strategy increasingly appears to be building the infrastructure where all of those transactions can coexist.

That could ultimately be more important for XRP than trying to force XRP into every single transaction.

The bigger picture

The argument for XRP has changed subtly.

Years ago, much of the discussion focused on whether banks would directly "use XRP."

That framing may now be too narrow.

The bigger opportunity may be whether the XRP Ledger develops into a financial marketplace containing stablecoins, tokenised deposits, securities, credit and other real-world assets — and whether XRP develops sufficient liquidity to become a useful connecting asset within that marketplace.

RLUSD can help build that marketplace.

That does not guarantee greater XRP demand.

It creates conditions under which greater XRP utility becomes possible.

The difference matters.

A successful RLUSD could therefore be simultaneously:

a substitute for XRP in some payment transactions,

and

one of the assets that makes XRP more useful across a much larger financial ecosystem.

Those two ideas are not contradictory.

They may be exactly what Ripple intended.

XRP Online View

The $13 trillion figure is impressive, but it should not be mistaken for XRP transaction volume waiting to happen.

The more important development is Ripple's access to approximately 1,200 corporate treasury customers already operating inside the traditional financial system.

RLUSD gives those companies a relatively familiar way to move dollar-denominated value onto blockchain infrastructure.

XRP then has to earn its place.

If XRP provides better liquidity between RLUSD, other stablecoins and tokenised assets, increased RLUSD adoption could create meaningful additional demand for XRP.

If institutions simply transfer RLUSD directly between themselves, however, XRP's role may be limited.

In other words, RLUSD growth creates an opportunity for XRP demand rather than a mathematical guarantee of it.

That may sound less exciting than claims that every RLUSD transaction somehow pushes XRP higher.

But it is also a much stronger long-term investment thesis: build a large financial ecosystem first, then let XRP compete to become one of its most efficient liquidity assets.