XRP (CRYPTO:XRP) was built to be the money that moves between banks, so nobody has to park cash abroad before a payment starts. However, most of Ripple’s institutional deals now settle in its RLUSD stablecoin, and the coin is only used to pay the network fee of 0.00001 XRP per transaction.
The XRP price hovers near $1.02 today, down 46% this year, and every major partnership Ripple has announced in 2026 has been built around the stablecoin rather than the token. So have stablecoins taken over the job XRP was built to do?
Are Stablecoins Replacing XRP as a Settlement Asset
Ripple closed ten major deals in the first half of 2026, and none of them used XRP as the settlement asset. Three of the deals never touched the XRP Ledger at all, and the seven that did settled in stablecoins, with XRP collecting the network fee.
The problem is that XRP price swings are unpredictable. A compliance team cannot sign off on settling a $50 million trade in something that might be worth $47 million by the time it clears, and that’s what rules XRP out. RLUSD is dollar-pegged, fully backed by cash and US Treasuries, and regulated by the New York DFS, which is what those teams need to see.
So most of Ripple’s institutional partners have been choosing the stablecoin instead. BlackRock uses RLUSD to redeem its BUIDL tokenized fund, which holds over $500 million in assets. Deutsche Bank has also integrated Ripple’s payment infrastructure for cross-border wires, and LMAX Group made RLUSD a core collateral asset across its institutional trading business.
Moreover, Mastercard has been settling real credit card transactions through RLUSD on the XRP Ledger since November 2025, alongside Gemini and WebBank. Société Générale launched its euro stablecoin on the same ledger in February, so the pattern holds in euros too. Card payments move more than $20 trillion a year globally, and even 1% of that would put $200 billion a year settling on the ledger without XRP touching any of it.
RLUSD has quickly grown into the settlement role, going from $643 million in circulation a year ago to $1.57 billion today. And on the XRP Ledger, RLUSD now accounts for roughly 89% of the $921.84 million stablecoin market there.
The One Job XRP Still Does
A payment corridor is just a route money travels, like the US to Mexico or Japan to the Philippines. Stablecoins have taken over the biggest ones, and more than 60% of global stablecoin liquidity is now concentrated in five trading pairs, mostly USDC and USDT against the dollar and the euro.
However, that leaves every other corridor thin. A Harvard Business School working paper from February 2026 compared what it costs to send money by bank wire, by services like Wise and Western Union, and by stablecoin, and found stablecoins competitive on retail-sized payments but weak on institutional ones.
A $10 million transfer through a thin pair moves the price against itself while the order fills, and the exchange fees on both ends eat the rest. Banks in emerging markets are the other problem, since plenty of them still will not touch crypto flows, so converting back into local currency gets expensive.
So XRP still has a job in the routes stablecoins cannot reach. Ripple’s On-Demand Liquidity product runs in more than 40 corridors, and roughly 40% of the 300-plus institutions on RippleNet actively use it. Instead of parking cash in a foreign account before a payment starts, a firm converts local currency into XRP, moves it across the ledger in seconds, and the receiving partner converts it into the destination currency on arrival. That cuts costs by 40% to 85% against correspondent banking.
Japan’s SBI Remit is one of the firms using ODL, moving around $2 billion a year into the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia through XRP. Bitso does the same on the US dollar to Mexican peso route for Latin America’s largest crypto platform. Both are thin pairs where a stablecoin transfer of that size would bleed money on the way through.
Stablecoins Are Winning, and RLUSD Is Growing With Them
Stablecoins have passed $250 billion in circulation, growing at a 77% compound rate over five years, and they moved $27.6 trillion in 2024, which is more than Visa and Mastercard combined.
Moreover, corporate adoption has barely started. An EY survey of 350 corporate treasuries found that only 13% currently use stablecoins, while more than half of the non-users expect to adopt them within six to twelve months, mostly for cross-border settlement speed rather than yield.
RLUSD has followed the same curve, more than doubling from $643 million in circulation a year ago to a record $1.81 billion on June 2. It fell to $1.46 billion on August 1 before recovering to $1.57 billion today, though those swings come from Ripple managing the supply rather than demand drying up. More than 80 million RLUSD came out of circulation in a sequence of 10-million-token burns in early July, with 20 million minted back.
RLUSD’s holder count has also grown 21.8% over the past 30 days to 74,056, while monthly active addresses fell 29.7% to 7,693 and transfer volume still rose to $9.82 billion, according to RWA.xyz. So fewer wallets are moving more money, which is what institutional use looks like rather than retail.
Ripple has kept pushing RLUSD into more places while all this happens, launching Ripple Mint for institutional minting and redemption, extending the token onto several other chains, and investing in the compliance network Notabene. None of that expansion needs XRP, and none of it creates any demand for the coin.
Are Stablecoins Making XRP Unnecessary?
Stablecoins have not made XRP unnecessary, but they have left it doing a much smaller job than Ripple originally promised. The settlement work that was supposed to justify a bridge currency now runs on dollar tokens, and what XRP keeps is the thin corridors those tokens cannot serve profitably.
However, RLUSD’s supply has already moved off Ethereum and onto the XRP Ledger, which now holds about 52% of the token against Ethereum’s 48%, a reversal from roughly 82% on Ethereum in March. Ripple executives said they expected that shift to help XRP, and it arrived while the XRP price kept falling.
So the only thing left that would change XRP’s position is Ripple settling its own deals in the token, and that needs XRP’s price to stop swinging the way it does. Deep enough liquidity and a stable enough price would let a compliance team sign off on it, and neither looks close while XRP trades 46% down on the year.
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