The deal concerns Ripple's dollar rail; the $XRP price was not part of the announcement.
The timing is deliberate. The rollout lands as Ripple Swell opens in New York the same day, where senior figures from both companies were scheduled to share a stage on institutional stablecoins' next step. Our coverage has already framed that agenda broadly, with Bessent putting Ripple's Swell in the U.S.-China tech race.
A Federally Supervised Dollar on $XRP Ledger
The addition was confirmed in a post on the Coinbase Assets account on October 28, which sets out the token's factsheet: $RLUSD is issued by Standard Custody & Trust Company, targets a one-dollar peg, launched in December 2024, and runs on the
$XRP Ledger, the network behind $XRP, and Ethereum. Ripple's disclosure of October 26 put the market cap at about $2.5 billion, a figure that sits alongside the press release's above-$2.4 billion milestone.
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The regulatory backdrop matters as much as the listing. Ripple received final approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for Ripple National Trust Bank, a charter that places the stablecoin's reserve management and custody infrastructure under federal supervision. Chief executive Brad Garlinghouse has framed combining a national trust bank with crypto rails as the company's route into traditional finance, and in a market with no central bank digital currency, corporate issuers holding federal charters occupy a distinct lane.
Executives on both sides supplied the strategic logic. Jack McDonald, Ripple's senior vice president for stablecoins, said institutions want compliant, high-quality stablecoins obtained through platforms they already trust, and that Coinbase brings $RLUSD to the largest institutional client base in US crypto across execution, settlement and custody. Coinbase Institutional co-CEO Brett Tejpaul described the listing as a step toward an everything exchange, one venue where clients pick the assets that fit their strategy; the move also widens the stablecoin shelf of Coinbase Global, whose shares trade as COIN. Competition sets the context. Coinbase has long run Circle's $USDC as its flagship stablecoin and has been adding alternatives, including PayPal's PYUSD and Open USD, the venture tied to Visa and Mastercard. $RLUSD extends that lineup so institutions can shift dollar exposure without opening an account elsewhere, and reserve transparency is where standing is earned: Moody's assigned $RLUSD an A2 rating on
$XRP Ledger and Ethereum, a grade our earlier coverage examined.
Taken together, the listing and the charter point the same way: Ripple is buying regulated distribution, not headlines. A Coinbase listing widens the funnel for $RLUSD but guarantees little on its own, and durable standing against USDT and $USDC will rest on reserve transparency and measurable payment use, which is why the pending collateral feature and the OCC charter are the details to track. For the ledger, $RLUSD settlement adds activity that runs on $XRP Ledger rails whatever the token tape does; readers following $XRP itself can keep our $XRP technical analysis page for the levels.
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