The parts that make this work
What RLUSD is, and who stands behind it
RLUSD is a token that its issuer promises to redeem for one US dollar. The issuer is Standard Custody & Trust Company, a New York limited purpose trust company that Ripple bought in 2024. The New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) approved RLUSD on December 10, 2024, and it launched a week later, on December 17, natively on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum.
It isn't a blockchain: it has no validators and no consensus of its own. The August 2026 reserve report lists seven approved networks: the XRP Ledger, Ethereum, Base, Unichain, OP Mainnet, Ink and the XRPL EVM Sidechain. Almost all of the supply sits on the first two. Standard Custody's job is to keep tokens and dollars in step; each chain's job is to agree on who holds which tokens.
One coin, two kinds of ledger
On the XRP Ledger RLUSD is an issued currency, not a smart contract. A holder opens a trust line to the issuer account rMxCKbEDwqr76QuheSUMdEGf4B9xJ8m5De; issuing is a payment from that account, and redeeming is a payment back to it, which simply cancels the debt. "RLUSD" is too long for the ledger's three-letter codes, so it's stored as the 40-character hex code 524C5553…. The issuer has the ledger's clawback flag set, which lets it take back tokens from a trust line.
On Ethereum RLUSD is an ERC-20 contract with 18 decimals at 0x8292…17eD. A mint shows up as a transfer from the zero address and a burn as a transfer to it, which is how live mode spots them. The layer 2s share one contract address, 0x8d58…8258.
Minting and redeeming
Only institutions that pass bank-level know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering checks deal with the issuer directly. Since July 23, 2026 they do it through Ripple Mint, a web console and API for minting, redeeming, bridging between chains and tracking each step; before that, issuance ran through Ripple's team by hand. Everyone else buys and sells RLUSD on exchanges. That arbitrage holds the price near a dollar: when RLUSD trades below $1, an eligible customer can buy it and redeem it at par.
What backs each token
Standard Custody publishes a reserve report every month, examined by Deloitte & Touche under AICPA attestation standards and following the NYDFS guidance of June 2022. On August 31, 2026 at 5:00 pm Eastern it reported 2,325,969,308 RLUSD outstanding on its approved networks against a reserve with a market value of $2,446,312,864, about 5 % more. In July 2025 Ripple chose BNY as the reserve's primary custodian.
RLUSD reserve, August 31, 2026
| Held in | US dollars |
|---|
| US Treasury bills, maturing September 1 to November 27, 2026 | 1,557,070,479 |
| Government money market funds | 467,625,232 |
| Cash deposits at US regulated financial institutions | 421,617,153 |
| Total reserve | 2,446,312,864 |
Ripple's transparency page showed 2,409.0 M RLUSD circulating against $2,531.5 M of reserves on September 24, 2026; that figure is Ripple's own and not yet examined. The reserve is published monthly and isn't on-chain: live mode shows it as reported, not as it is now. Source: RLUSD Reserve Report, August 2026 (PDF, dated September 29, 2026) and RLUSD transparency.
A transfer is only as final as its chain
Ripple takes no part in an ordinary transfer. An RLUSD payment on the XRP Ledger is final once the ledger that contains it is validated by the network's validators, usually within five seconds, and it can cross currencies on the ledger's built-in exchange on the way. On Ethereum a transfer is final after about two epochs of validator attestations. Base, OP Mainnet, Unichain and Ink are rollups that order transactions themselves and settle to Ethereum later; the XRPL EVM Sidechain has validators of its own. The same token has as many kinds of finality as it has chains.
Wormhole: reaching the layer 2s
RLUSD reaches Base, OP Mainnet, Unichain, Ink and the XRPL EVM Sidechain through Wormhole's Native Token Transfers (NTT). Ripple began testing it in December 2025 and the networks were live by June 2026. NTT can either lock tokens on a hub chain or burn them; RLUSD's NTT contract on Ethereum holds no RLUSD, and on Base the tokens appear as mints from the zero address, so a transfer burns on one side and mints on the other. Wormhole's guardians sign the message in between, and Ripple controls the contracts and their rate limits. Live mode shows that these chains together held only about 0.1 M RLUSD at the end of September 2026. Moving between the XRP Ledger and Ethereum isn't a bridge at all: a Ripple Mint customer redeems on one and has RLUSD issued on the other.
Regulation
As a New York trust company, Standard Custody is supervised by the NYDFS, which sets what the reserve may hold: Treasury bills within three months of maturity, overnight Treasury repo, government money market funds and bank deposits, segregated from the company's own assets. In December 2025 the OCC conditionally approved Ripple's application for a national trust bank, Ripple National Trust Bank, which Ripple has said would manage the RLUSD reserve; the bank hadn't finished its pre-opening steps when last reported. In the United States, the GENIUS Act became law on July 18, 2025 and takes effect on January 18, 2027 or 120 days after regulators finish its rules, whichever comes first.
What live mode shows, and what the animation simplifies
Live mode reads all seven networks straight from public nodes every 30 to 60 seconds and adds them up. On Ethereum it reads every new block's RLUSD transfers, which gives the transfer rate, volume and each mint and burn. On the XRP Ledger it reads the issuer's obligations through gateway_balances and shows a change between two readings as a net mint or burn, with no transaction behind it. The reserve comes from the latest monthly report and is labelled with its date. The animation draws the reserve as one vault, each chain as a small ring of wallets, and sends Wormhole's message past the vault for want of a better place; in reality the guardians sign it without the issuer. Step-by-step mode starts from an illustrative billion. Compare USDC, whose issuer runs its own cross-chain protocol. Read Ripple's RLUSD documentation for the details.