Ripple targets corporate treasuries for RLUSD expansion

Ripple is targeting corporate treasury flows as a major growth avenue for its RLUSD stablecoin, with executive Jack McDonald pointing to customers of its treasury platform that process about $13 trillion in payments annually.

McDonald, Ripple’s senior vice-president of stablecoins, said the company sees an opportunity to place RLUSD more deeply into the day-to-day movement of corporate cash, including cross-border transfers, transactions between subsidiaries and domestic payments. The push follows Ripple’s $1 billion acquisition of treasury-management software provider GTreasury in 2025.

The acquired business, now part of Ripple Treasury, serves about 1,200 corporate treasurers and chief financial officers. Ripple says its customers facilitated roughly $13 trillion in payments volume last year, giving the company a sizeable existing network through which it can introduce digital-asset tools alongside conventional treasury functions.

RLUSD’s circulating supply has climbed to about $2.4 billion, up more than 50 per cent over the past month. Roughly $1 billion is circulating on the XRP Ledger and about $1.4 billion on Ethereum, according to figures cited by McDonald. Ripple’s own transparency page put circulating RLUSD at $2.396 billion as of September 3, backed by reserve funds of about $2.518 billion.

McDonald said utility and transaction activity matter more to Ripple than market capitalisation alone. Daily active RLUSD volume has risen sharply during 2026, he said, reaching about $750 million from around $200 million last month, as the token gains use in payments and capital-markets transactions.

Those two areas are currently the principal drivers of RLUSD activity. Ripple has positioned the dollar-backed token for institutional settlement, liquidity management and collateral, while integrating it with its broader payments and treasury products. The company has also worked with financial institutions on tokenised assets and lending structures in which stablecoins can provide settlement or collateral functions.

Corporate treasury represents a different scale of potential usage from cryptocurrency trading. Treasury departments routinely move cash among banks, entities and jurisdictions while managing liquidity, foreign-exchange exposure and short-term funding. Ripple’s strategy is to make RLUSD one of the instruments available inside those existing workflows rather than requiring finance teams to adopt a separate crypto-focused system.

The company expanded its Ripple Treasury platform this month with additional artificial-intelligence functions for forecasting, liquidity, risk, reconciliation and reporting. Ripple said the tools operate within corporate policies and require human oversight, reflecting the governance requirements of large finance departments.

Europe is another focus. McDonald said Ripple intends to make RLUSD available locally through a dual-issuance structure designed to comply with the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets framework, known as MiCA. The company received full Crypto Asset Service Provider authorisation from Luxembourg’s financial regulator in July, after securing preliminary approval in June.

That authorisation permits Ripple to provide regulated crypto-asset services across the European Economic Area, subject to the MiCA framework. Ripple also holds an electronic money institution licence in the European Union. Bringing RLUSD itself into the region, however, requires the stablecoin’s issuance structure to meet the rules applying to dollar-linked electronic-money tokens, making the proposed dual arrangement a separate regulatory step from Ripple’s service-provider licence.

RLUSD is issued in the United States through Standard Custody & Trust Company, a Ripple subsidiary regulated by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Ripple says the token is backed one-for-one by US dollar deposits, short-term US Treasuries and other cash equivalents, with reserves held separately from operating funds. BNY serves as the primary reserve custodian.

Ripple launched RLUSD in late 2024 and has increasingly directed it towards institutional uses rather than consumer payments. Its expansion has included availability in additional markets and integration into Ripple Payments, where stablecoins can be used to settle cross-border transactions.