What happened
RLUSD, the dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by Ripple's New York-chartered trust subsidiary, crossed $2 billion in circulating supply on Tuesday, according to on-chain data flagged by Crypto Briefing. The report puts the XRP Ledger-issued tranche at close to $1 billion, with the balance sitting on Ethereum. That is a sharp change in mix.
For most of the first half of 2026, Ethereum carried the bulk of the float and the XRPL side lagged well behind, a gap Ripple executives had publicly said they wanted to close. The token launched on December 17, 2024 under a limited-purpose trust charter from the New York Department of Financial Services, the same license structure that governs Paxos-issued stablecoins. Reserves are held in cash and short-dated US Treasury bills at BNY Mellon, per Ripple's disclosures at launch.
Why it matters
Two billion dollars is not a headline number in stablecoin terms. Tether sits above $140 billion, Circle's USDC north of $60 billion. What matters is the growth curve and where the issuance is landing.
RLUSD went from zero to $2 billion in roughly nine months, and the XRP Ledger portion moved from a rounding error to nearly half the float. That gives Ripple a native settlement asset on its own chain for the first time at meaningful scale. It also gives XRPL something it has visibly lacked against competing L1s: a compliant, dollar-denominated unit of account issued by a regulated US entity.
The headline reads clean. The concentration picture is messier. A single issuer, a single custodian, and a chain where the top ten accounts hold a sizeable share of supply is exactly the shape of risk US and EU regulators have been flagging in stablecoin frameworks all year.