Ripple, the financial services firm closely associated with the $XRP Ledger ($XRP) blockchain, is looking to corporate treasurers to drive the next leg of growth for its Ripple USD $RLUSD$1.0015 stablecoin, eyeing a customer base that handles roughly $13 trillion in transactions annually.
Jack McDonald, Ripple's senior vice president of stablecoins, told CoinDesk in an interview that the one of the biggest opportunities is Ripple Treasury, the business built around its $1 billion acquisition of treasury-management software provider GTreasury last year.
The platform’s roughly 1,200 corporate treasurer and CFO customers move money across borders, between subsidiaries and domestically, giving Ripple a large pool of traditional financial activity it could bring onto blockchain rails, McDonald said.
“That customer base hadn't been onchain,” he said. “They touch roughly 13 trillion dollars worth of transactions on an annual basis.”
“So that opportunity set is just massive,” McDonald added.
That opportunity is opening up as stablecoins move beyond their roots in crypto trading and become a bigger part of payments and financial infrastructure. More than $300 billion of stablecoins are now in circulation, while governments are putting regulatory frameworks in place and banks, payment firms and fintechs are increasingly building around the technology.
$RLUSD, launched nearly two years ago, remains far behind long-established giants Tether's $USDT $USDT$0.9998 and Circle's $USDC $USDC$0.9998, but it has been growing rapidly.
Its circulating supply has climbed to $2.4 billion, up more than 50% over the past month, according to Token Terminal data. About $1 billion is on the $XRP Ledger, while $1.4 billion is on Ethereum ETH$2,535.23.
But Ripple is more focused on $RLUSD being used than the headline market capitalization.
“What's more exciting to us is the utility and the daily activity,” McDonald said.
$RLUSD's daily activity more than tripled since the beginning of the year, climbing to roughly $750 million a day last month from about $200 million, he noted.
Payments and capital markets drive usage
Payments and capital markets are currently the two main areas of adoption. Ripple has made $RLUSD the primary stablecoin in its payments business, while in capital markets the token can be used for the cash leg of transactions, settlement and collateral.
Ripple has worked with firms including Franklin Templeton and DBS around tokenized money-market funds and lending, while $RLUSD can also be posted as collateral through Ripple Prime, the institutional brokerage business built from its acquisition of Hidden Road.
That strategy reflects Ripple's broader push to combine stablecoins with custody, trading, payments and prime brokerage rather than operate $RLUSD as a standalone product.