Ripple MiCA Approval Boosts RLUSD, Leaves XRP Support at $1.10

Ripple received preliminary approval from the Luxembourg CSSF as a crypto asset service provider under the EU’s MiCA regulation, and XRP fell 3% on the news. The token is trading at $1.10, down 5% over 24 hours, with the crypto market offering no coverage.

The regulatory step is real, but is unfortunately not an XRP catalyst. Ripple has structured the approval entirely around RLUSD and Ripple Payments infrastructure, with XRP appearing only as something that “underpins” these solutions, a footnote in Ripple’s own announcement regarding its own network’s native token.

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The green light from CASP allows regulated crypto-asset services in all 30 countries of the European Economic Area. This does not create a direct demand mechanism for XRP.

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Ripple MiCA Win is infrastructure plumbing, not an XRP demand catalyst

The green light from the CSSF is a “Green Light Letter”, a prior approval which remains subject to definitive conditions before full MiCA compliance is granted. Ripple said that upon full approval, the CASP license, combined with its existing European Electronic Money Institution (EMI) license, also issued from Luxembourg, would make it fully MiCA compliant.

What the approval actually covers is the Ripple Payments and RLUSD distribution infrastructure. The business case is that European banks, fintechs and businesses can manage collection, exchange and payment through a single Ripple integration across the entire EEA.

There is an additional nuance that the ad does not address. A CASP license authorizes cryptoasset services, but it is structurally distinct from the separate authorization a stablecoin needs to be issued as a MiCA e-money token. Ripple’s announcement touts stablecoin payment infrastructure without clarifying RLUSD’s own position under MiCA’s non-euro token regime, which caps the use of dollar-pegged stablecoins as a medium of exchange within the bloc.

Tether’s USDT, on the other hand, was effectively kicked out of Europe before MiCA was implemented. Circle, however, brought USDC and EURC into compliance via its EMI. Where RLUSD sits on this spectrum is precisely the question institutions will want to get right before committing to integration.

Ripple is also arriving at this stage late compared to its peers. MiCA became fully applicable to crypto-asset service providers in December 2024. Circle obtained approval in April 2025 and B2C2 obtained a CASP license from the Luxembourg CSSF in May 2025. OKX, Coinbase and Kraken were authorized until 2025.

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Ripple’s differentiator is the combined EMI-plus-CASP full stack, “a regulated rail for the entire payments flow” backed by over $100 billion in Ripple payments volume across 60+ markets and 75+ licenses worldwide. This is a credible business pitch. It does not route revenue or demand through XRP.

This model is not new. The XRP community publicly pushed back against Ripple’s Swell 2026 program last week for prioritizing the development of RLUSD while the token was underperforming. The RLUSD regulatory queue also extends beyond Europe, with California’s DFAL filing deadline adding another stablecoin-focused regulatory hurdle to the list.

It’s true that every major Ripple announcement this cycle confirms the same thesis: the company is building a compliant payments infrastructure in which RLUSD is the product and XRP is the backend infrastructure. The green light from MiCA has not yet been taken into account – because, structurally, there is nothing to integrate into the price of XRP.

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