RLUSD Rockets to Ethereum - 82% of Supply Lands on the EVM

RLUSD’s circulating supply has surged to about $1.26 billion since launch, but here’s the twist: roughly $1.03 billion of that — about 82% — currently lives on Ethereum instead of Ripple’s native ledger. The remaining ~$235 million sits on XRPL. In plain English: the new stablecoin is throwing a house party on the EVM and XRPL is awkwardly standing by the snack table.

Why Ethereum became RLUSD’s favorite playground

Ethereum already has the plumbing that dollar-ish tokens love — deep pools, composable apps, and a whole suite of DeFi toys that make moving and using dollars cheap and fast. Once a stablecoin shows up as an ERC‑20, it can plug straight into lending markets, automated market makers, and DEX routing engines that traders and institutions actually use every day.

Case in point: RLUSD is seeing real liquidity and usage on known DeFi venues. There’s a sizable USDC/RLUSD pool on Curve with tens of millions in liquidity, and the token has been integrated into lending and swapping rails where institutions, market makers, and arbitrage desks operate. That depth matters — it keeps slippage low for big trades and lets pro players run the basis trades and automated flows that move modern crypto markets.

XRPL, by contrast, is still assembling the DeFi toolkit. Its protocol-level automated market maker only arrived recently, and native RLUSD pools are much shallower for now. On top of that, XRPL’s account model often requires a small XRP balance, explicit trustlines to an issuer, and optional authorization gates that can be enabled for compliance. Those are great for banks that demand control, but annoying for frictionless, high-frequency DeFi flows.

The practical effect is simple: a dollar of RLUSD on Ethereum currently finds more places to be used for swaps, leverage, payments, and yield than the same dollar on XRPL. That’s why liquidity and flows have skewed heavily toward the EVM.

What’s actually happening on-chain — and where this could go

People who say the Ethereum RLUSD balances are just vanity numbers are missing the action. Transfer volume and transaction counts have jumped alongside supply, which suggests real usage rather than a few wallets hoarding coins. Weekly transfer volume on Ethereum has climbed into the high hundreds of millions to around a billion dollars on average, and weekly transfer counts rose from the low hundreds to several thousand. Holder numbers also expanded dramatically — from a few hundred to several thousand addresses this year — showing distribution beyond a tiny clique.

Looking forward, a reasonable short-term scenario projects Ethereum’s RLUSD supply rising to roughly $1.4–$1.7 billion if Curve liquidity stays in the tens of millions and centralized/exchange demand keeps growing. XRPL would likely gain some extra liquidity under that path but remain a minority share of the total.

There’s also a catch-up playbook: targeted AMM rewards, better UX that hides trustline complexity, and custodial integrations could push XRPL’s RLUSD liquidity northward — perhaps into the hundreds of millions and a meaningful single-digit-to-mid-20s percent slice of supply. But that requires deliberate effort and budget, and it’s not guaranteed.

The opposite risk is that Ethereum’s network effects become self-reinforcing. If key pools on Curve grow huge and the EVM ecosystem keeps monopolizing easy dollar rails, Ethereum could hold 80–90% of supply for the long run, making it tough for XRPL to reclaim ground.

So Ripple is in a funny spot: to scale its stablecoin ambitions it’s leaning on the infrastructure of a rival ecosystem. That pragmatic choice makes sense if your goal is rapid adoption, but it also leaves you depending on someone else’s plumbing. Either way, RLUSD’s jump to the EVM is a neat case study in how utility, UX, and existing liquidity networks steer where capital actually settles — and it’s a reminder that in crypto, convenience often wins.