When a bank in the Philippines receives a payment initiated in Mexico, several things happen that most senders never see. Dollars sit idle in pre-funded accounts at correspondent banks in New York, London, and Singapore — capital locked up for days just to enable a single transaction. Those accounts have a name: nostro accounts (from a bank's perspective on its own foreign-currency funds) and vostro accounts (funds a bank holds on behalf of another institution). Together they represent trillions of dollars in trapped liquidity, a friction cost passed on as fees and delays to the businesses and individuals who depend on cross-border payments.
Ripple has spent years building an alternative. By mid-2026, it has assembled something more ambitious than a payment rail: a regulated institutional settlement stack combining a stablecoin, a bridge currency, a prime brokerage platform, and a custody network. Understanding how the pieces fit together requires separating two assets that are routinely conflated — XRP and RLUSD — because they are not the same instrument serving the same purpose.
XRP and RLUSD: Two Assets, Two Jobs
XRP serves as a bridge currency inside Ripple Payments, the product formerly known as On-Demand Liquidity (ODL). In a Ripple Payments corridor, a sending institution converts local fiat into XRP; XRP transmits across the XRP Ledger in three to five seconds for a fraction of a cent; the receiving institution converts XRP into destination fiat. The result is real-time settlement without pre-funded nostro/vostro accounts sitting idle at correspondent banks around the world.
RLUSD serves a different function. It is Ripple's fiat-backed stablecoin: a dollar-pegged instrument for counterparties who want dollar-denominated settlement without exposure to XRP's price volatility. Where XRP is the shuttle that crosses the chasm between two fiat currencies, RLUSD is the stable dollar platform used on either side of a transaction. The two assets are complementary within Ripple's ecosystem — not interchangeable.
For a grounding in how fiat-backed stablecoin reserve models work — and where they break, the first-principles guide is worth reading before going further.
RLUSD: The Regulated Dollar Layer
RLUSD launched globally on December 17, 2024, after the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) approved Standard Custody & Trust Company — a Ripple subsidiary operating under a limited-purpose trust company charter. That charter places RLUSD in the same regulated stablecoin tier as USDC and PYUSD: issuers subject to capital requirements, mandatory redemption rights, and supervisory oversight from day one.
The reserve structure is transparent by design: 1:1 backing by US dollar deposits, short-term Treasury bills, and cash equivalents held in segregated accounts. BNY Mellon became the primary custodian for those reserves in July 2025, and Deloitte publishes monthly attestations. In December 2025, the OCC granted conditional approval for Ripple National Trust Bank (RNTB), which will manage RLUSD reserves under dual federal (OCC) and state (NYDFS) oversight — the same dual-charter structure regulators apply to federally chartered banks. The US stablecoin framework's requirements for issuers operating at this level have grown substantially since the GENIUS Act moved into implementation.
RLUSD is issued natively on both the XRP Ledger and Ethereum, with cross-chain movement handled by Wormhole Native Token Transfers. By June 2026, it had expanded to more than 40 blockchains, including Ethereum L2s Base and Optimism. Market cap reached approximately $1.57 billion by late June 2026 — surpassing $500 million within seven months of launch and crossing $1 billion by late 2025. In June 2026, Japan's JFSA approved SBI VC Trade to list RLUSD, and Ripple received a preliminary MiCA license in Luxembourg, adding regulated footprints across North America, the Gulf, Asia, and Europe.
Ripple Payments: Settlement Without Correspondent Banks
Ripple Payments — the current brand for the ODL product — is live across more than 20 corridors connecting financial institutions in more than 55 countries. RippleNet, the broader messaging and coordination network, connects more than 300 institutions. Confirmed active ODL users include SBI Remit (serving Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia through the SBI Ripple Asia joint venture), Santander, Remitly, and Tranglo.
One nuance matters here: not every RippleNet member uses XRP for settlement. Verified data indicates roughly 40 percent of the network's partners use XRP for active ODL-style bridging; the remainder use RippleNet for messaging and coordination without the XRP bridge step. The 2025 SEC settlement and December 2025 OCC trust bank approval removed regulatory barriers that had kept several banking-sector partners from committing capital to XRP-based flows. That regulatory journey is covered in detail in Part 2 of this series.
Ripple Prime: Prime Brokerage and RLUSD as Institutional Collateral
The most consequential move Ripple made in 2025 was not a protocol upgrade. On April 8, 2025, at Paris Blockchain Week, Ripple announced the $1.25 billion acquisition of Hidden Road, a multi-asset prime broker. The deal closed October 24, 2025; Hidden Road was rebranded Ripple Prime.
Prime brokerage is the business of giving institutional clients — hedge funds, asset managers, trading firms — a single venue for clearing, financing, and trading across multiple asset classes, so they do not need separate counterparty relationships for every instrument type. Ripple Prime provides that across foreign exchange, digital assets, derivatives, swaps, fixed income, exchange-traded products, precious metals, and tokenized assets. It clears more than $3 trillion annually and serves more than 300 institutional clients, making Ripple the first crypto-native company to own and operate a global multi-asset prime broker.
RLUSD's role at Ripple Prime is structural. Certain derivatives clients hold RLUSD balances and use them as collateral for prime-brokerage products. Ripple describes RLUSD as "the first stablecoin to enable efficient cross-margining between the digital asset space and traditional markets." Cross-margining means a firm can post a single pool of collateral against positions across multiple product types at the same clearinghouse, reducing the total capital required. A dollar position in RLUSD can serve as margin for a derivatives book at the same venue, rather than requiring separate collateral pools for each product category.
By June 2026, Ripple Prime's revenue had grown more than threefold since the acquisition closed, according to Ripple Prime CEO Mike Higgins. A planned migration of post-trade settlement to the XRP Ledger — not yet complete as of June 2026 — would eventually put institutional clearing directly on-chain.
The Mastercard Pilot — and Why Visa Is Not in the Picture
On November 5, 2025, at Ripple Swell 2025, Ripple announced a collaboration with Mastercard, WebBank, and Gemini to pilot RLUSD-based settlement of card transactions on the XRP Ledger. The pilot targets the Gemini Credit Card, issued by WebBank, and explores settling card transactions between Mastercard and WebBank using RLUSD on-chain — described at announcement as one of the first instances of a regulated US bank settling card payments with a regulated stablecoin on a public blockchain.
As of June 2026, the pilot is still in the integration-planning and onboarding phase. No live transaction volume has been announced.
One clarification worth stating plainly: Visa is not a Ripple partner. Visa's stablecoin settlement work consists of the Visa Tokenized Asset Platform (VTAP), launched in October 2024 and focused on Ethereum with BBVA as the pilot bank, plus a separate USDC settlement pilot on Solana. Both are entirely independent of Ripple's stack. Mastercard is the confirmed card-network partner here; the two payment networks are pursuing parallel but unrelated stablecoin settlement strategies.
Custody, Core Banking, and Tokenization
Ripple Custody — rebranded from Metaco following Ripple's $250 million acquisition in May 2023 — provides digital asset custody to HSBC (via the Harmonize platform, integrated with HSBC Orion for tokenized securities), BBVA, and Zodia Custody.
In January 2026, DXC Technology integrated Ripple Payments and Ripple Custody into its Hogan core banking platform, which underpins $5 trillion in client deposits across 300 million accounts. Banks running on Hogan can layer in programmable payments and tokenized RWA custody without displacing core infrastructure.
On April 15, 2026, Ripple and Kyobo Life Insurance — one of South Korea's three largest insurers, with more than $92 billion in assets — announced a pilot to tokenize Korean government bond settlement via Ripple Custody, targeting compression of the standard T+2 settlement cycle to near-real-time. The partnership is in an exploratory stage; no live date has been announced, and the pilot uses Ripple Custody rather than XRP or ODL. For readers considering what tokenising government bonds actually requires at the legal wrapper and settlement infrastructure level, the distance between a pilot announcement and production-grade settlement is worth understanding carefully.
Key Takeaways
- XRP and RLUSD are complementary assets with distinct roles. XRP bridges fiat currencies in real time via Ripple Payments (ODL); RLUSD provides stable dollar denomination for counterparties who need dollar settlement without XRP price exposure. Neither replaces the other.
- RLUSD holds approximately $1.57 billion in circulation as of late June 2026. It is NYDFS-regulated, BNY Mellon-custodied, Deloitte-attested, and issued natively on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum. The OCC's conditional approval of Ripple National Trust Bank adds a federal oversight layer to its reserve management.
- Ripple Prime (Hidden Road, acquired for $1.25 billion, deal closed October 2025) is the first crypto-native multi-asset prime broker. It clears $3T+ annually, serves 300+ institutional clients, and uses RLUSD as cross-margin collateral bridging digital asset and traditional market products.
- The Mastercard/WebBank/Gemini card-settlement pilot announced in November 2025 is still in planning as of June 2026. Visa is not a Ripple partner — its stablecoin work (VTAP on Ethereum, USDC on Solana) is a separate, parallel effort with no connection to Ripple's stack.
- Kyobo Life's April 2026 partnership is an exploratory pilot for tokenized Korean government bond settlement via Ripple Custody — not a live ODL or XRP deployment.
