Ripple's 10 major 2026 institutional deals all settled in RLUSD rather than XRP, as price volatility blocks compliance approval on large trades. RLUSD has more than doubled in a year to $1.57 billion and now holds 89% of the XRP Ledger's stablecoin market, with BlackRock, Deutsche Bank, and Mastercard all choosing it over XRP. RP still handles the thin corridors stablecoins cannot serve, like SBI Remit's $2 billion a year from Japan into Southeast Asia, where large stablecoin transfers bleed money on slippage.
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So have stablecoins taken over the job XRP was built to do? Ripple closed ten major deals in the first half of 2026, and none of them used XRP as the settlement asset. Three of the deals never touched the XRP Ledger at all, and the seven that did settled in stablecoins, with XRP collecting the network fee.
The problem is that XRP price swings are unpredictable. A compliance team cannot sign off on settling a $50 million trade in something that might be worth $47 million by the time it clears, and that's what rules XRP out. RLUSD is dollar-pegged, fully backed by cash and US Treasuries, and regulated by the New York DFS, which is what those teams need to see.
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So most of Ripple's institutional partners have been choosing the stablecoin instead. BlackRock uses RLUSD to redeem its BUIDL tokenized fund, which holds over $500 million in assets. Deutsche Bank has also integrated Ripple's payment infrastructure for cross-border wires, and LMAX Group made RLUSD a core collateral asset across its institutional trading business.
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