Ripple is attacking RLUSD's two biggest obstacles — clunky issuance and counterparty risk — in a single day, betting that compliance infrastructure matters as much as settlement speed.
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Ripple launches Ripple Mint and Notabene deal to push RLUSD to 2,300 firms
Ripple launched Ripple Mint, a platform letting institutions mint, redeem, bridge and track its dollar-backed RLUSD stablecoin through a web dashboard or direct API integration, the company said July 23. The platform replaces a manual process where customers arranged issuance directly with Ripple and waited for settlement.
"Bringing together RLUSD, Ripple Payments and Notabene's trusted institutional network to help scale compliant stablecoin payments," Jack McDonald, senior vice president of stablecoins at Ripple, said.
RLUSD now trades on six networks beyond the XRP Ledger and Ethereum — the XRPL EVM Sidechain, Base, Optimism, Ink and Unichain — widening the number of chains where the token can circulate. The stablecoin carries a market value of about $1.5 billion, split between $877 million on the XRP Ledger and $643 million on Ethereum, according to RWA.xyz data.
The moves target a gap between supply and usage. RLUSD's holder count rose 6% and active addresses climbed 70% over the past month, but its market cap slipped almost 5% and monthly transfer volume fell 25% to $10.95 billion from roughly $14.6 billion, according to CoinDesk data. More wallets are holding RLUSD while less money moves across it — a pattern that suggests the token is being treated as something to own rather than something to use.
Ripple Mint solves the access problem
Ripple Mint adds programmatic access alongside the web interface, so RLUSD operations can run inside an institution's own treasury software. Teams can mint, redeem and bridge through code, pull balances and transaction status the same way, and receive automatic alerts at every stage from fiat receipt through minting to final payout. Each step carries the same reference ID, simplifying reconciliation for exchanges and market makers.
Circle has offered institutions similar access to USDC through Circle Mint for years. Standard Chartered on July 2 became the first major global bank to let clients mint and redeem USDC without holding a Circle account. USDC's supply stands at about $73 billion against RLUSD's roughly $1.5 billion, and it turned over its entire supply about 16 times in June, carrying roughly two-thirds of all stablecoin transaction volume that month, according to The Block data.
Ripple Mint is available to existing RLUSD customers only, meaning it streamlines operations for current users rather than pulling in new ones.
Notabene deal solves the trust problem
Ripple also made a strategic investment in Notabene, a compliance network that connects more than 2,300 institutions across over 100 jurisdictions and carries more than $2 trillion in annualized transaction volume. RLUSD is being integrated into Notabene Flow, the company's business payments platform handling pull payments, recurring payments and invoicing.
Notabene's network screens counterparties and authorizes transfers before they settle, addressing a persistent regulatory concern: an institution sending a stablecoin payment has no built-in way to know who controls the receiving wallet, even though regulators require it to identify the recipient first. When Notabene raised its Series B in November 2024, about 165 companies used the platform and it had handled close to $500 billion in transaction volume over the prior year. It now serves more than 280 customers, including tier-1 banks and custodians.
Ripple did not disclose the size of its investment. The two companies will also explore whether Notabene's authorization layer can work with Ripple Payments, which recently secured Markets in Crypto-Assets registration in Europe.
What this means for XRP
The XRP Ledger holds more RLUSD than any other network after passing Ethereum in late June, so more of this activity runs on XRP's own ledger than anywhere else. Every transaction on the XRP Ledger destroys a small amount of XRP as a network fee, though that burn has removed about 14 million XRP since 2012 — 0.014% of the original supply in 14 years, far too small to move the price.
XRP traded near $1.11 on Monday, up more than 1% over the past week, and ranks sixth by market capitalization among all cryptocurrencies, according to CoinGecko data. Ripple Mint makes RLUSD easier to create, but creating more of it does nothing for XRP if that supply never moves. The Notabene deal is the one that could change that, putting RLUSD in front of thousands of institutions that can send and receive it. If those institutions start moving RLUSD, most of that traffic would run on the XRP Ledger, and each transfer would burn a fraction of a cent in XRP — a mechanism that has barely registered in 14 years.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
