Ripple's New Stablecoin Could Change How the World Moves Money

Leo Sun, The Motley Fool

Fri, May 22, 2026 astatine 11:25 AM CDT 4 min read

Ripple, a fintech institution specializing successful blockchain-based wealth transfers, is often associated with the XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) token. However, respective of Ripple's founders and different developers launched XRP successful 2012, earlier Ripple (then known arsenic OpenCoin) was founded.

Ripple subsequently utilized XRP arsenic a "bridge currency" to accelerate fiat transactions connected its platform. By converting some fiat currencies to XRP earlier swapping them, Ripple processed cross-border wealth transfers faster and much cheaply than accepted SWIFT transfers. XRP's supporters expect a increasing fig of wealth transfers, on with Ripple's improvement from a integer payments level into a afloat integer bank, to marque the token much valuable.

But successful 2024, Ripple launched its ain stablecoin, Ripple USD (CRYPTO: RLUSD), which was pegged to the U.S. dollar. Let's spot wherefore this stablecoin could alteration however the satellite moves money, and wherefore it could correspond an existential menace to XRP.

What are the differences betwixt Ripple USD and XRP?

XRP is simply a volatile token. Over the past 52 weeks, it's swung betwixt a precocious of $3.65 and a debased of $1.13. It traded beneath $1 for astir of 2022, 2023, and 2024.

That volatility tin beryllium attributed to the SEC's 2020 suit against Ripple, which alleges the institution illegally sold its XRP holdings arsenic unlicensed securities to money its expansion. That suit caused Ripple to suffer its apical customers and the apical crypto exchanges to delist XRP.

That suit ended successful 2025 with a lighter-than-expected good for Ripple and a ruling that XRP wasn't an unlicensed information erstwhile sold to retail investors. XRP's terms recovered arsenic crypto exchanges relisted the token and crypto firms launched the archetypal XRP spot terms ETFs. That was bully quality for XRP, but its volatility made it unreliable for accordant cross-border transfers.

Ripple USD is overmuch much reliable arsenic a span currency due to the fact that it's pegged to the U.S. dollar. Every token is an "IOU" issued by an idiosyncratic gateway (such arsenic Bitstamp oregon GateHub) connected the XRP Ledger. Those gateways backmost the "IOUs" with U.S. dollars from their ain slope accounts.

Ripple's USD gateways fundamentally enactment arsenic "banks" that contented their ain integer U.S. dollars, which are acold little volatile than XRP. Therefore, Ripple USD could easy cannibalize a ample information of the ledger's cross-border transfers that antecedently relied connected XRP.