Ripple USD (RLUSD): who issues the stablecoin, what backs it and where it is allowed

RLUSD, or Ripple USD, is a US dollar stablecoin issued by Standard Custody & Trust Company (SCTC), a New York trust company owned by Ripple Labs. About 2.6 billion RLUSD were in circulation on 28 October 2026, according to DefiLlama, and 62% of them sat on Ethereum rather than on the XRP Ledger that Ripple built its business around. In the last week of October the OCC gave final approval to Ripple’s national trust bank, Moody’s assigned the stablecoin A2 and P-1 ratings, and Coinbase listed it.

For a holder, the mechanics matter more than the headlines: who can create and redeem the token, what the reserve holds, what Ripple can do to tokens in a wallet, and which regulators allow it. The news itself is in our reports on the Moody’s A2 rating of RLUSD and on the final OCC approval of Ripple’s trust bank.

What RLUSD is: a stablecoin issued by a New York trust company, not by Ripple Labs

Ripple’s whitepaper, in its version of 4 June 2026, describes RLUSD as backed one for one by US dollars and dollar-equivalent assets. The legal issuer is SCTC, a limited-purpose trust company chartered and supervised by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) and wholly owned by Ripple Labs. Ripple announced on 13 February 2024 that it had agreed to buy the trust company. It did not disclose the price.

Ripple’s main RLUSD product page does not name SCTC. Its transparency page, the whitepaper and the monthly reserve reports do. The distinction matters because a second Ripple entity now exists. Ripple National Trust Bank, which received final OCC approval on 26 October 2026, will manage the segregated reserves and act as collateral trustee for holders, Ripple said that day. Issuance stays with SCTC.

Nor is the token the same thing as XRP, the native token of the XRP Ledger. XRP floats on the market and pays fees on that ledger. RLUSD is meant to stay at one dollar and is a claim on a pool of cash and short-term US government debt.

The token went live on 17 December 2024 on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum, with Uphold, MoonPay, Archax and CoinMENA among the first venues, The Block reported. A week earlier, on 10 December, Ripple chief executive Brad Garlinghouse had written on X that NYDFS had given its final approval; we found no announcement by NYDFS itself. The September 2026 reserve report lists seven “NYDFS-approved blockchain networks”: the XRP Ledger, Ethereum, Base, Unichain, Optimism, Ink and the XRPL EVM Sidechain.

Who can mint and redeem RLUSD, and where retail users buy it

The whitepaper is blunt about the customer: “RLUSD is distributed to enterprise partners only.” Only institutions that have passed SCTC’s anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer onboarding deal with the issuer. Everyone else goes through the secondary market.

Minting, as the whitepaper draws it, starts with a dollar deposit. SCTC moves the money into the reserve account, runs a compliance check on the customer’s wallet and, if the check passes, signs the on-chain transaction that delivers the tokens. Redemption runs the other way. The customer sends RLUSD to SCTC’s redemption wallet, SCTC checks the sending wallet, instructs its partner banks, and dollars land in the customer’s bank account.

Ripple’s FAQ says that if it ever stopped issuing RLUSD, holders could still exchange their tokens for “an equivalent amount of U.S. dollars” during a redemption period. Fees, minimum amounts and cut-off times for minting and redemption are not published in the documents we read.

The same page of the whitepaper says Ripple will not conduct B2C transactions, so retail buyers use platforms. Coinbase added RLUSD to its retail app, Exchange and Prime on 28 October 2026, with deposits and withdrawals on the XRP Ledger, Base and Ethereum; our report on the RLUSD listing on Coinbase has the details. Ripple’s October 2024 announcement named Uphold, Bitstamp, Bitso, MoonPay, Independent Reserve, CoinMENA and Bullish as exchange partners, with B2C2 and Keyrock as market makers. Ripple’s availability page lists more partners but no countries, so whether you can buy depends on the platform and where you live.

RLUSD reserves: Treasury bills, repos and a 103% floor

The whitepaper allows four kinds of reserve asset, following NYDFS guidance of 8 June 2022 on dollar stablecoins: Treasury bills with three months or less to run, overnight reverse repurchase agreements on Treasuries, government money-market funds, and deposits at US banks. Non-cash assets are held at the Bank of New York Mellon (BNY), which Ripple named primary custodian of the reserves on 9 July 2025. Jack McDonald, Ripple’s senior vice president for stablecoins, called BNY “the ideal partner for Ripple and RLUSD” at the time. Cash goes only to FDIC-insured banks approved by NYDFS.

SCTC keeps more than it owes. A 3% buffer, checked every day, is meant to keep the reserve’s value at “at least 103% of the total RLUSD in circulation”, in the whitepaper’s words. Moody’s, quoted by The Block on 28 October 2026, said the reserve “is predominantly invested in highly liquid, short-duration U.S. government assets and cash” and that the 103% target exceeds the minimum coverage associated with its rating.

An independent US certified public accountant examines the reserve under AICPA standards. Each monthly report covers two dates, and Ripple’s RLUSD transparency page holds 22 of them, from December 2024 to September 2026. These are attestations: the accountant tests management’s assertion at two moments, which is narrower than an audit of SCTC’s accounts. The September report, dated 26 October 2026, carries Jack McDonald’s signature as SCTC’s chief executive, and its text does not name the accounting firm. The February 2026 report does: Deloitte & Touche LLP signed it on 26 March 2026.

Date (5 pm ET)	RLUSD outstanding	Reserve value	Coverage	Source
19 Feb 2026	1,538,640,717	$1,610,986,444	104.7%	February 2026 reserve report
27 Feb 2026	1,495,023,851	$1,568,986,016	104.9%	February 2026 reserve report
21 Sep 2026	2,425,816,183	$2,558,148,227	105.5%	September 2026 reserve report
30 Sep 2026	2,399,995,528	$2,524,008,274	105.2%	September 2026 reserve report
22 Oct 2026	$2,382.8 million	$2,528.0 million	106.1%	Ripple’s transparency page, not attested

The reports promise a breakdown by asset class, but in the September file it is not in extractable text, and Ripple’s web page gives no split either. So the share held as bank deposits, and the names of those banks, are unknown. One definition did change during the year. In February, “outstanding” units meant tokens on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum; in September, tokens on all seven approved networks.

RLUSD supply by chain: Ethereum holds 62%, Base a sliver

At 19:33 UTC on 28 October 2026, DefiLlama counted $2,604.9 million of RLUSD: $1,627.2 million on Ethereum (62.5%) and $977.7 million on the XRP Ledger (37.5%). Reading the chains directly gave the same picture. The Ethereum contract reported a total supply of 1,627,057,610 tokens at block 26,293,349, and the XRP Ledger issuer account showed obligations of 977,635,476 tokens at ledger 107,964,676.

DefiLlama tracks only those two chains. The whitepaper prints one address, 0x8d58c0c60b8d6b88fa98b291a646db34d0f98258, for the five others, and we queried it on each. Base held about 16.1 million RLUSD at 19:35 UTC. Optimism, Unichain, Ink and the XRPL EVM Sidechain held between 121 and 144 tokens each. Ripple’s code repository describes native issuance on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum; whether the Base supply is minted there or bridged is not documented.

The balance between the two main chains has swung hard. At the end of February 2026 Ethereum held about $1.24 billion and the XRP Ledger $256 million. By the end of June the XRP Ledger had passed Ethereum, and in August Ethereum took the lead again. No primary source explains the moves. Protos tied Ethereum’s weight to DeFi usage in June 2026, noting that DeFi on Ethereum dwarfs what the XRP Ledger offers.

Month end	Total ($M)	Ethereum ($M)	XRP Ledger ($M)
Dec 2024	58	58	0
Jun 2025	455	389	66
Dec 2025	1,336	1,043	293
Feb 2026	1,495	1,239	256
May 2026	1,698	1,085	613
Jun 2026	1,564	751	813
Jul 2026	1,583	702	881
Aug 2026	2,369	1,329	1,041
Sep 2026	2,521	1,396	1,125
28 Oct 2026 (00:00 UTC)	2,599	1,597	1,002

Do the attested and on-chain figures agree? Yes, once the clock is matched. The 30 September attestation, taken at 5 pm New York time, counted 2,399,995,528 tokens; DefiLlama’s next daily point, at 00:00 UTC on 1 October, showed $2,399.9 million. Its point from the start of 30 September, $2,521 million, is higher because supply fell by about $121 million during that day. The February report and DefiLlama line up the same way, and Ripple’s 22 October figure of $2,382.8 million falls between DefiLlama’s points for 22 and 23 October. Moves of $100 million in a day, as between 26 and 27 October, are common in this series.

Anyone can repeat the check. The transparency page gives the attested figure, the XRP Ledger’s gateway_balances call returns the obligations of issuer rMxCKbEDwqr76QuheSUMdEGf4B9xJ8m5De, and the Ethereum token at 0x8292Bb45bf1Ee4d140127049757C2E0fF06317eD answers a totalSupply call.

What Ripple can do to RLUSD in your wallet: freeze, claw back, upgrade

RLUSD is built for regulated users, and the issuer keeps the controls a bank would want. We queried the XRP Ledger issuer account on 28 October 2026. Clawback is switched on. The no-freeze flag is not set, so Ripple can still freeze single trust lines or the whole issuance. A global freeze was not active, anyone can hold the token without approval, and the account’s master key is disabled.

On Ethereum, Ripple’s design notes describe an ERC-20 token built on OpenZeppelin code, with Minter, Burner, Pauser, Clawbacker and Upgrader roles. The Pauser can freeze one address or all of them; the Clawbacker can burn tokens from any address without the owner’s signature. The token sits behind an upgradeable proxy. That proxy went live on 9 August 2024 and has been upgraded once, on 6 September 2025, to an implementation published on Blockscout as StablecoinUpgradeableV2.

Sanctions are one stated reason to use these powers: “SCTC takes steps to freeze all known OFAC sanctioned wallets on all blockchains on which RLUSD is natively issued,” the whitepaper says. We found no public record of a freeze or clawback actually being carried out.

The upgrade key drew the most criticism. On 31 October 2025 LlamaRisk, a risk adviser to Aave, wrote in a governance review of RLUSD as Aave collateral that the upgrade role sat with a “7/8 threshold” multisig that could change the contract without delay, because no timelock existed. Ripple said one was in the works, with no timeline. Its bug bounty then covered only the XRP Ledger, with Ethereum planned for the first half of 2026. LlamaRisk advised against making RLUSD collateral, and the thread closed automatically on 30 November 2025.

The chain shows what has changed since. The Upgrader role was granted on 9 August 2024 to one of Ripple’s MultiSign contracts and has not been granted to any other address or revoked since. That contract weighs its signers: the last change, on 22 July 2026, set 11 signers with weights of 2 or 3 and a quorum of 7, so three of them can approve an upgrade. Ripple’s notes describe the contract as checking signatures and forwarding the call; they mention no delay. Whether an Ethereum bug bounty now exists, we could not confirm.

One public code audit, older than the contract now running

The only security review of the RLUSD contracts we found is OpenZeppelin’s “Ripple Stablecoin Contracts Audit”, dated 1 July 2024 and published by Ripple in its GitHub repository. The whitepaper links to it. We could read the cover but not the findings, so their number and severity are not stated here.

The date matters. The audit predates the September 2025 upgrade, and we found no published review of the version 2 code now running on Ethereum. Ripple says RLUSD falls inside its SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 audits, which customers can read under a non-disclosure agreement; they are not public.

RLUSD regulation: New York, Washington, Dubai, Japan and the MiCA gap

United States: NYDFS today, the GENIUS Act from January 2027

SCTC answers to NYDFS, which charters and examines New York trust companies. The federal layer is newer. The OCC conditionally approved Ripple National Trust Bank on 12 December 2025 and gave final approval on 26 October 2026. The GENIUS Act and the OCC’s rule implementing it take effect on 18 January 2027, according to the OCC’s release of 21 October 2026. Whether SCTC will be treated as a state or a federal issuer under the Act, and what Ripple must file before that date, has not been made public.

European Union: RLUSD is not an authorised e-money token

Under MiCA, a dollar stablecoin offered in the EU must be an e-money token (EMT) issued by an authorised firm. On 28 October 2026 we searched ESMA’s interim register of EMT white papers, a file last modified on 22 October. It held 50 rows from 25 issuers, Circle’s and Paxos’s European entities among them. Ripple, SCTC and RLUSD were not in it.

Ripple’s European licences so far concern services, not the token. Ripple says it holds an EU e-money institution licence, and on 23 June 2026 it announced a preliminary approval, a “Green Light Letter” subject to final conditions, from Luxembourg’s CSSF for a MiCA licence as a crypto-asset service provider. That release mentions RLUSD only in its boilerplate.

On 8 October 2026 ESMA published an opinion on services linked to non-compliant stablecoins. It says MiCA-authorised platforms should stop such services, and asks national authorities to have the exposures they find remedied no later than three months after publication: by our count, 8 January 2027, a date ESMA does not print. Until then, platforms may only help clients sell, convert, withdraw, transfer or keep the tokens. The opinion names no token; our report on ESMA’s stablecoin deadline covers the reactions. Our reading, not a statement by ESMA or Ripple, is that RLUSD falls in this group while it has no EMT authorisation. Which EU platforms list it today is not known, so EU readers should ask their platform.

United Kingdom, Dubai and Japan

We found no FCA approval of RLUSD itself, so it is not a UK-regulated stablecoin. Ripple says its UK business received an e-money licence and a cryptoasset registration from the FCA in January 2026, which covers its payment services. In Dubai, Ripple announced on 3 June 2025 that the DFSA had approved RLUSD as a recognised crypto token for use in the DIFC financial centre. In Japan, The Block reported on 24 June 2026 that RLUSD became available through SBI VC Trade after the Financial Services Agency classed it as a new type of electronic payment instrument.

Where RLUSD is used: Ripple’s payment rails, banks and DeFi lending

Ripple told The Block that RLUSD is “mainly used as an instrument within Ripple’s payment infrastructure and as collateral in Ripple Prime”. Ripple Payments has used it since 2 April 2025, when Ripple named the cross-border payment firms BKK Forex and iSend as early users. Ripple Prime is the former Hidden Road, a prime broker whose purchase Ripple completed in October 2025, according to press reports.

Banks are starting to hold it. Standard Chartered began custody of RLUSD on the XRP Ledger for clients of its DIFC branch on 12 October 2026, The Block reported, and a plan with LMAX Group to accept the custodied tokens as collateral had no launch date.

In DeFi, most of the token’s weight has sat on Aave. LlamaRisk estimated in October 2025 that about 80% of circulating RLUSD was held on Aave’s main market and Horizon, its permissioned market for institutions, and linked the growth to incentive programmes. It counted about $52 million of liquidity on decentralised exchanges, $49.8 million of it in one Curve pool, and found that only $27 million of RLUSD could be swapped for USDC on Ethereum within a 6% price impact. Current balances on those protocols were not part of our check.

RLUSD peg history: ten rough days at launch, then a narrow band

DefiLlama’s hourly series for the Ethereum token starts on 18 December 2024. In the first ten days readings ran from $0.975, on 22 and 26 December, to $1.063, on 18 and 20 December, while little supply existed. The last hourly reading below $0.99 came on 28 December 2024. Since January 2025 the daily points have stayed between $0.994 and $1.004. LlamaRisk found the token within 0.1% of a dollar on Curve over six months, with a widest gap of 14 basis points in May 2025.

Hourly and daily points can miss short spikes between readings. What the data shows is no sustained depeg since the launch weeks.

Team and advisory board

Jack McDonald is Ripple’s senior vice president for stablecoins and chief executive of SCTC. He already ran Standard Custody when Ripple agreed to buy it, and he signs the management assertion in the reserve reports. Brad Garlinghouse is Ripple’s chief executive, and Chris Larsen its co-founder and executive chairman.

Ripple announced an advisory board on 15 October 2024 with three members: Sheila Bair, former chair of the FDIC, David Puth, former chief executive of the CENTRE consortium, and Larsen. Ripple’s advisory board page now lists two more: Kenneth Montgomery, former first vice president and chief operating officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, and Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India. When the board was announced, Bair said that “responsible innovation will be paramount” to the adoption of stablecoins.

Is RLUSD safe? Why we rate the risk 2 out of 5

Our rating of 2 (low to moderate) is Coindaro’s opinion, not a credit rating. It reflects a supervised issuer and a reserve above 105% in the latest attestation, set against four weaknesses.

The first is access. Only onboarded institutions redeem with the issuer, so a retail holder depends on exchange prices and liquidity to get out. In a stress event that holder stands behind the institutions.

The second is control. Ripple can freeze tokens, burn them from any address and replace the Ethereum contract with the approval of three signers. For a bank this is normal compliance; for someone who wants a censorship-resistant dollar it is a reason to look elsewhere. The only public code audit is older than the code now running.

The third is concentration. Two chains hold more than 99% of the supply, and in late 2025 a single lending protocol held most of it, according to LlamaRisk.

The fourth is regulation. RLUSD has no EMT authorisation in the EU, the UK has no regime that covers it yet, and how the GENIUS Act applies to SCTC is not public. In the United States, the Independent Community Bankers of America sued the OCC on 2 October 2026 over its rules for national trust bank charters, the kind Ripple’s new bank holds; the case has not been decided.

Moody’s, for its part, named a weaker reserve, lower coverage and weaker liquidity or redemption capacity among the changes that could lower its rating, The Block reported. RLUSD pays holders no yield of its own, and its growth so far has followed Ripple’s products and partners.

Three dates come next. The October 2026 reserve report should appear on Ripple’s transparency page in late November, if the usual lag holds. ESMA’s three-month period runs out on 8 January 2027, and the GENIUS Act rules start on 18 January 2027.