RLUSD gets two new partnerships — but transfer volume dropped 25%

Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin picked up two boosts at once — against a backdrop of a 25% drop in monthly transfer volume, from roughly $14.6 billion to $11 billion, CoinDesk reports. Meanwhile, holder counts grew 6% and active addresses jumped 70%, even as market cap slipped 5%.

The two boosts

• Ripple Mint — a new automated platform for institutional clients: minting, redeeming, and tracking RLUSD is now available via a web dashboard or API instead of a manual process.
• A strategic investment in Notabene — a compliance network for business-to-business settlement that, per CryptoBriefing, processes over $2 trillion annually.

Holding, not moving

CoinDesk describes a paradox: more wallets are holding RLUSD, while less money is moving through it — meaning the token is increasingly being used as a store rather than a means of settlement. RLUSD's market value sits around $1.5 billion, with about $877 million on the XRP Ledger and roughly $643 million on Ethereum. The token's reach has also expanded to the XRPL EVM, Base, Optimism, Ink, and Unichain sidechains.

Context: rivals are under regulatory pressure too

RLUSD is expanding at a moment when its biggest rivals are living under new rules: Tether, for instance, has only two years to bring USDT into compliance with the GENIUS Act — we covered that story separately. The financial terms of the Notabene investment itself weren't disclosed, but the partnership is meant to expand Ripple's footprint in the regulated segment of blockchain settlement — the same space where Travel Rule compliance is becoming an increasingly mandatory box for institutional clients to check.

None of this should be read as personalized investment advice.