RLUSD Supply Hits $2.44B All-Time High as XRP Price Slips
Ripple's stablecoin RLUSD is surging while XRP is down 27% year to date, revealing a meaningful institutional decoupling.
Ripple's dollar-backed stablecoin RLUSD crossed a new milestone this week, with circulating supply reaching $2.442 billion — a more than tenfold increase over the same period that XRP has shed roughly 27 percent of its value. The divergence is not accidental noise; it reflects a deliberate institutional pattern of using RLUSD as settlement and treasury infrastructure entirely separate from any bet on XRP's price. The XRP Ledger now ranks as the 11th-largest stablecoin chain by native supply, a marker of genuine network adoption that nonetheless says little about where XRP itself is headed.
The supply trajectory has been steep and consistent. RLUSD stood near $1.7 billion in mid-August, cleared $2 billion by late August, and reached $2.32 billion in early September — a monthly growth rate of 15 to 20 percent. That kind of compounding expansion in stablecoin supply signals expanding on-chain liquidity and real-world transactional demand, but it operates on a fundamentally different track than demand for the native token. Conflating the two would be a category error that market commentary has repeatedly made.
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On the ETF side, five spot XRP funds are now live in the US — from Bitwise, Franklin Templeton, Canary Capital, Grayscale, and REX-Osprey. Bitwise's fund leads the group by a wide margin, with roughly $520 million in assets under management and $22 to $28 million in daily trading volume. Franklin Templeton's XRPZ holds second place with around $388 million in AUM and offers the lowest expense ratio of the group at 0.19 percent, compared with Bitwise's 0.34 percent — a meaningful consideration for longer-duration holders. The remaining three funds trail significantly on both volume and assets.
Cumulative XRP ETF inflows since launch are approaching the $1 billion mark, but daily inflows have run in the low single-digit millions in recent sessions — steady rather than accelerating. For the RLUSD adoption story to fully merge with an XRP price recovery narrative, analysts would need to see a sustained and material shift in those daily ETF flows, not isolated large sessions. Until that happens, the more structurally significant story remains RLUSD's role as institutional crypto infrastructure, decoupled from XRP's own price performance.
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