Ripple USD RLUSD

RLUSD is issued by Ripple through a trust subsidiary supervised by the New York State Department of Financial Services. The token arrived at the end of 2024 on two ledgers at once — the XRP Ledger and Ethereum — which is unusual for a newly launched dollar token. On the XRP Ledger it relies on the built-in issued-asset mechanism rather than on a smart contract.

Reserves are dollar deposits, short-dated US Treasury obligations and cash equivalents, with composition disclosed in regular attestations by an outside accounting firm; one-for-one redemption is available to vetted institutional clients. Like other regulated dollar tokens, it allows addresses to be frozen when the law demands it.

The token is meant for settlement and cross-border payment flows inside Ripple's products, where a stable intermediate unit beats a volatile one. It is fundamentally unlike XRP: XRP is the ledger's own volatile coin, RLUSD a reserve-backed liability of an issuer.

RLUSD and XRP are different things: the first is a reserve-backed liability of an issuer, the second an independent volatile ledger asset.