Ripple is looking to corporate treasury operations as a major growth channel for its RLUSD stablecoin, targeting a network of companies that collectively handle roughly $13 trillion in transactions each year.
Jack McDonald, Ripple’s senior vice president of stablecoins, told CoinDesk that the opportunity is closely tied to Ripple Treasury, the company’s corporate treasury-management business built around its $1 billion acquisition of GTreasury in 2025. The acquisition gave Ripple direct access to a large base of corporate finance teams that manage cash across borders, subsidiaries and domestic accounts.
The scale of that customer base could give Ripple a way to introduce blockchain-based settlement into financial workflows that have traditionally remained outside the crypto industry.
“That customer base hadn’t been onchain,” McDonald said, noting that its customers touch roughly $13 trillion in annual transactions.
“So that opportunity set is just massive,” he added.
The figure represents the transaction activity handled by Ripple Treasury customers rather than $13 trillion of corporate cash that could immediately flow into RLUSD. Still, the size of the network highlights why Ripple sees corporate treasury as an important distribution channel for its stablecoin.
Ripple wants utility, not just supply growth
RLUSD remains a relatively small player in the stablecoin market compared with Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC. But its supply has expanded rapidly.
Ripple’s latest transparency data showed approximately $2.4 billion of RLUSD in circulation as of Sept. 3, 2026, backed by reserves exceeding the amount of tokens outstanding.
Third-party blockchain data also puts RLUSD’s supply around $2.4 billion, with tokens distributed across the XRP Ledger and Ethereum.
Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin supply (Source: Token Terminal)
McDonald said Ripple is less interested in headline market capitalization than in whether RLUSD is actually being used.
“What’s more exciting to us is the utility and the daily activity,” he said.
According to McDonald, daily RLUSD activity has more than tripled since the beginning of the year, reaching roughly $750 million a day last month from about $200 million.
That distinction is important for Ripple. Rather than compete solely for a larger share of the stablecoin supply market, the company is positioning RLUSD as part of a broader financial infrastructure spanning payments, treasury management, capital markets and institutional trading.
Payments and capital markets lead adoption
Payments are one of Ripple’s primary use cases for RLUSD. The company has made the stablecoin part of its payments infrastructure, allowing businesses to use digital dollars as part of cross-border transactions and settlement.
Capital markets represent another potential growth area.
RLUSD can be used as the cash component of transactions, for settlement and as collateral. Ripple has also worked with financial institutions including Franklin Templeton and DBS on tokenized money-market funds and lending-related initiatives.
The stablecoin can also be used as collateral through Ripple Prime, the institutional brokerage business created following Ripple’s acquisition of Hidden Road.
The strategy reflects Ripple’s broader effort to build an integrated institutional financial stack rather than operate RLUSD as an isolated cryptocurrency.
“Stablecoins [are] evolving from a crypto asset to part of financial infrastructure,” McDonald said.
That shift could be particularly important for corporate treasurers, whose priorities are typically liquidity, settlement speed, cash visibility, risk management and regulatory compliance rather than cryptocurrency speculation.
Ripple’s treasury business is already being expanded to accommodate digital assets. In April, Ripple Treasury launched a treasury management system with native digital-asset capabilities, extending the infrastructure inherited from GTreasury into blockchain-based assets. Ripple said the platform facilitated $13 trillion in payments volume in 2025.
Europe becomes another target
Ripple is also looking to expand RLUSD into Europe as regulatory clarity around stablecoins improves.
McDonald said Ripple wants to introduce the dollar-backed stablecoin through a dual-issuance structure designed to comply with the European Union’s Markets in Crypto-Assets, or MiCA, framework.
Ripple has strengthened its regulatory position in the region this year. The company received a full Electronic Money Institution license from Luxembourg in February and later obtained full MiCA authorization as a Crypto Asset Service Provider. The latter allows Ripple to offer regulated crypto services across the European Economic Area.
The regulatory progress gives Ripple a foundation for expanding its payments, custody, trading and stablecoin operations across Europe.
McDonald said demand remains stronger for dollar-backed stablecoins than for tokens denominated in euros or emerging-market currencies. That creates an opportunity for RLUSD even in markets where the underlying transactions are conducted in multiple currencies.
Ripple also sees a role for stablecoins alongside bank-issued tokenized deposits.
Deposit tokens can work effectively within individual banks or closed networks, McDonald explained, while stablecoins can provide a bridge when money needs to move between different institutions and systems.
“When you want to go outside of that walled garden, that’s where stablecoins come into play,” he said.
Ripple expands selectively across blockchains
RLUSD was originally launched on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum, but Ripple has continued expanding its availability across additional networks, including Base, Ink, Optimism and Unichain.
The company is not pursuing every blockchain, however.
“We want to be where there is demand,” McDonald said, signaling that Ripple’s strategy is focused on institutional use rather than maximizing the number of networks supporting RLUSD.
That approach fits with the company’s broader positioning of RLUSD as infrastructure for businesses and financial institutions.
The $13 trillion annual transaction figure gives Ripple a potentially significant distribution advantage: instead of trying to persuade companies to enter crypto markets from scratch, it can introduce stablecoin functionality through treasury systems they already use.
The challenge will be converting that existing financial activity into meaningful RLUSD usage. With a circulation of about $2.4 billion today, RLUSD remains tiny compared with the transaction flows Ripple is targeting.
But if Ripple can embed the stablecoin into corporate payments, liquidity management and capital-market workflows, the company would be competing for something larger than a share of crypto trading.
It would be competing for a role in the infrastructure companies use to move money every day.
