Ripple, the American company behind the third largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, made headlines on December 16 by announcing that its long-awaited stablecoin is finally ready for deployment, which will take place later in the day.
There was much speculation and fraud attempts before the official statement, but data from CryptoQuant shows that the actual number of new tokens issued reached almost $66 million.
Interestingly, the majority of RLUSD coins are on the Ethereum network – $52.9 million, while only $13.3 million was minted by Ripple – XRPL.
The numbers are quite impressive, considering the stablecoin has yet to officially see the light of day. This is expected to take place later today, as reported yesterday.
After receiving the necessary green light from the NYDFS, the Ripple team announced on December 16 that RLUSD would go live the following day. Additionally, the stablecoin advisory board welcomed a few new additions: Raghuram Rajan (former RBI governor) and Kenneth Montgomery (former senior vice president and chief operating officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston).
Ripple has described RLUSD as “the future of finance.” It is a stable currency fully backed by U.S. dollar deposits, government bonds, and “other cash equivalents with monthly third-party audits.” It will have multi-chain support, which is already evident in the minting process on Ethereum and XRPL, and other networks will come later.
RLUSD is designed for “cross-border payments, DeFi integration, and bridging fiat and crypto.”
Ripple aims to enter a highly competitive and growing stablecoin market. The total value of all these tokens recently exceeded $200 billion and is mainly dominated by Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC.
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