Ripple, the US-based enterprise company behind the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, made the headlines on December 16, announcing that its long-anticipated stablecoin is finally ready to be deployed, which will happen later today.
There were a lot of speculations and fraud attempts ahead of the official statement, but CryptoQuant’s data shows that the actual number of minted new tokens has risen to almost $66 million.
Interestingly, the majority of the RLUSD coins are on the Ethereum network – $52.9 million, while only $13.3 million have been minted on Ripple’s own – XRPL.
The numbers are quite impressive, given the fact that the stablecoin has not officially seen the light of day yet. This is scheduled to take place later today, as reported yesterday.
After receiving the necessary green light from the NYDFS, Ripple’s team announced on December 16 that RLUSD was going live the next day. Moreover, the stablecoin Advisory board has seen a couple of new additions – Raghuram Rajan (former RBI governor) and Kenneth Montgomery (former First VP and COO of Boston’s Federal Reserve).
Ripple described RLUSD as the “future of finance.” It’s a stablecoin fully backed by US dollar deposits, government bonds and “other cash equivalents with monthly third-party audits.” It will receive multi-chain support, which is already evident by the minting process on Ethereum and XRPL, with other networks coming later.
RLUSD is built for “cross-border payments, DeFi integration, and bridging between fiat and crypto.”
Ripple aims to enter a highly competitive and growing stablecoin market. The total value of all such tokens has shot above $200 billion recently and is mostly dominated by Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC.
