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American blockchain payments firm Ripple Labs Inc. triggered bullish market sentiment when it launched RLUSD stablecoin on global exchanges. While the price has seen no intense volatility, as previously hinted, its growth trends in 24 hours have not been particularly smooth.
Unexpected RLUSD depegging
As a stablecoin, RLUSD stablecoin is expected to maintain a 1:1 peg with the U.S. dollar. However, data from XPMarket shows that the token has slightly depegged and was trading for $0.99 at the time of writing.
When the RLUSD stablecoin launched on Dec. 17, its price started at over $1.10. Ripple CTO David Schwartz projected this instability for the token, advising prospective users not to FOMO into buying it.
Amid the instability, the stablecoin has seen an appreciable surge in its market cap and other key performance metrics. The stablecoin jumped from a fully diluted market cap of $13 million at launch to $15.1 million as of writing time.
In addition, the market cap shifted from $1.3 million to $2.9 million as of writing time. Notably, there was intense publicity leading up to the token's launch on global exchanges like Moonpay, Bitso and Uphold.
Based on this, the number of holders has skyrocketed from under 1,000 at launch to over 5,800 as of writing.
Start of new era
According to Ripple executives, the launch of RLUSD will usher in a new era for assets like XRP. With the new stablecoin serving as a liquidity layer for XRP, both assets will find better adoption on AMM protocols running on the XRP Ledger.
Besides this, Ripple Labs hopes to dominate the blockchain payments scene, an ambition the new RLUSD stablecoin can help it to achieve.
Both XRP and RLUSD will act in a complementary manner, setting the pace for the stablecoin to compete with dominant rivals like Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC).