Most of Ripple’s own stablecoin lives on Ethereum

The majority of the Ripple USD stablecoin is on Ethereum, the top competitor to Ripple’s XRP Ledger.

Indeed, $879 million of the roughly $1.63 billion worth of tokens in circulation sits on Ethereum versus $760 million on the XRP Ledger, a 53-to-47 split in Ethereum’s favor.

Ripple markets its dollar-pegged stablecoin as a flagship of the XRP Ledger’s enterprise readiness, yet an entirely different blockchain minted the majority of the supply.

RLUSD launched in December 2024 with an impressive-sounding New York State Department of Financial Services license.

Unable to fulfill its launch on just the XRPL, Ripple issued tokens natively on two blockchains, pitching XRP as the “home” venue even though Ethereum has hosted the majority of the tokens.

By October 2025, roughly 88% of RLUSD supply lived on Ethereum, with just $91 million on XRPL. 

Although Ethereum has ceded some of its dominance to XRPL over the past eight months, XRPL remains in second place.

By the end of 2025, Ethereum’s share was still 81%, roughly $1 billion against $235 million on XRPL. Today, after 18 months of work, XRPL has worked itself up to a 47% share.

On Ethereum, Ripple USD is useful on DeFi applications that dwarf comparable DeFi on XRPL.

For example, Ripple put RLUSD into the Aave V3 lending market in April 2025, where users may deposit it for yield or borrow it for a fee collateralized by other Ethereum-based digital assets. 

By late 2025, nearly two-thirds of all RLUSD had been deposited into Aave. RLUSD once ranked as the largest single asset in the protocol’s institutional Horizon market.

Curve and Morpho, other DeFi platforms, also vault hundreds of millions more of Ethereum-based RLUSD.

The transaction record also points to the success of Ripple USD on Ethereum. 

RLUSD transfer volume hit a record $18.4 billion in the first quarter of 2026, most of which was not XRPL transactions. Instead, Ethereum provided a larger, wealthier community of DeFi users with deeper liquidity pools.

XRP, the token that fans of XRPL can purchase, captures almost none of the value of RLUSD dominance slowly transitioning away from Ethereum.

Every RLUSD transfer on the XRP Ledger burns a fee of approximately one hundred thousandth of 1 XRP, an amount worth less than $0.0001. 

Despite Ripple’s marketing of RLUSD as an institutional settlement token with its home on XRPL, XRP tokenholders enjoy a reduction of supply measured in fractions of fractions of a cent for those settlements.

Read more: Years of hype but still no deal: SWIFT sidesteps XRP again

Of course, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has long argued that finance will run across many blockchains. The company even enlisted the Wormhole cross-blockchain bridge to push RLUSD onto Ethereum layer-2 networks like Coinbase’s Base. 

Reserves for the stablecoin are blockchain agnostic, sitting off-chain with the Bank of New York Mellon, which Ripple named as a primary custodian in July 2025.

As of writing time, XRP is trading at $1.27, down 31% from where it started 2026 and 41% over the last year.

The clearest growth story in Ripple’s orbit is a stablecoin whose largest home is Ethereum, the network XRP had hoped to displace.

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