Ripple’s dollar-backed stablecoin, RLUSD, has received approval for use on the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) after being officially recognized as an accepted token listed by Fiat, giving it a regulatory foothold in one of the most tightly regulated crypto hubs in the world.
The Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA) designation means that businesses licensed by the authority can now use RLUSD for regulated activities, Ripple said on Thursday. The approval places the stablecoin alongside a small group of tokens authorized in the ADGM ring-fenced financial system.
For Ripple, this is an important step toward the Middle East, where banks and payment companies have been quicker to adopt tokenized settlement rails than their U.S. counterparts. This follows a recent expansion in Bahrain and continued growth in the Gulf, where the company is pitching RLUSD as a settlement asset that can connect to payment corridors and capital market applications without the regulatory overhead that has hamstrung competitors in the United States and Europe.
RLUSD, introduced in late 2024 under a New York DFS trust charter, has surpassed $1.2 billion in circulating supply thanks to growing institutional demand for a dollar token with defined reserve rules and redemption rights. This makes it the 10th largest stablecoin by market capitalization, according to CoinGecko data.
The token has also started appearing in the collateral and settlement flows of Ripple’s corporate clients as part of the company’s strategy to position RLUSD directly into its cross-border payments stack.
While U.S. regulatory-bound stablecoins typically dominate global volumes, ADGM’s approval gives Ripple access to a jurisdiction that has built a reputation for strict token classification and bank-friendly digital asset frameworks.
These guarantees are one of the main reasons why several financial institutions in the Middle East and Africa – from Zand Bank in the United Arab Emirates to Absa in Africa – have already come on board Ripple’s rails this year.
Thanks to legal clarity in one of the Middle East’s most conservative financial jurisdictions, RLUSD is now entering a market that has treated regulated stablecoins as fundamental infrastructure and not mere speculative assets.
