Ripple is the US digital-asset payments company that operates the Ripple Payments cross-border settlement business and issues Ripple USD (RLUSD), a dollar payment stablecoin issued through a New York trust company with reserves held in short-dated US Treasuries under custody at BNY (Bank of New York). For a tokenisation operator, RLUSD matters less for its size than for the institutional plumbing forming around it in mid-2026: an OCC (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) national trust charter application at the conditional-approval stage for reserve management, a reserve-custody seat at BNY alongside USDC and USDO, a role as counterparty in BNY's first after-hours US Treasury settlement, and a strategic investment routing RLUSD into Notabene's Travel Rule compliance network for business-to-business stablecoin payments.
RLUSD and the regulatory perimeter
- RLUSD is issued through a New York trust company, placing issuance under the NYDFS limited-purpose trust regime (Ledger Insights, 10 Jul 2026).
- Ripple has applied for an OCC national trust charter to manage RLUSD reserves, an application at the conditional-approval stage as of 10 July 2026, within the 5-firm cohort alongside Circle (final approval), Paxos, BitGo, and Fidelity Digital Assets under the trust-bank chartering programme. The emerging structure mirrors Circle's: a state-regulated company issues the stablecoin while a federal trust bank safeguards the reserves.
- BNY is reserve custodian for RLUSD, whose reserves hold short-dated US Treasuries (Ledger Insights, 24 Jul 2026).
Recent activity
- 24 Jul 2026. Ledger Insights reported that BNY settled a US Treasury transaction earlier in 2026 after the Federal Reserve's Fedwire Securities Service had closed for the day, between Ripple and Dreyfus acting for OpenEden (issuer of the USDO stablecoin); the trade was executed on Tradeweb and settled on BNY's own books, both counterparties being reserve-custody clients of the bank. RLUSD's reserve profile is what put Ripple on that trade: short-dated Treasuries that need to move outside Fedwire hours.
- 23 Jul 2026. Ripple made a strategic investment of undisclosed size in Notabene, the New York-based operator of what it describes as the largest open network for Travel Rule-compliant crypto transactions; the firms will integrate RLUSD into Notabene Flow, the business-to-business stablecoin payments platform Notabene launched earlier in 2026, and Notabene is exploring how its pre-transaction authorisation capabilities could complement Ripple Payments (Ledger Insights). The network spans more than 2,300 connected institutions across 100 jurisdictions and facilitates over $2 trillion in annualised transaction volume as of July 2026, a figure reflecting Travel Rule messaging processed through the network rather than stablecoin payment flows.
- 15 Jul 2026. Ripple joined Visa and Mastercard in backing x402, the standard letting AI agents pay in stablecoins, with agent payments averaging 32 cents per CoinDesk's headline (CoinDesk); only the headline of this piece is in the archived record.
- 13 Jul 2026. A UK HM Treasury report on tokenisation cited Ripple as a convergence model (CoinDesk); only the headline of this piece is in the archived record.
- 10 Jul 2026. Ripple's OCC national trust charter application was reported at the conditional-approval stage as Circle became the first of the cohort to receive final approval (Ledger Insights).
Open questions
- Whether the OCC application converts to final approval, and how reserve management then splits between the New York trust issuer and the federal trust bank.
- The size of the Notabene stake, and whether pre-transaction authorisation moves from a compliance overlay to the default initiation layer for institutional RLUSD flows.
- RLUSD outstanding supply, reserve composition beyond the BNY-custodied Treasury sleeve, and attestation cadence; none of these are in the archived record.
- The x402 backing is the clearest agentic-commerce signal on this page; the scope of Ripple's commitment to the standard is not yet documented beyond the headline.