Ripple Announces Major Update to Enhance Utilities for XRP and RLUSD

Renowned San Francisco–based blockchain company Ripple has taken another step to boost adoption for its U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, RLUSD.

On Monday, December 15, the company announced the expansion of RLUSD to multiple layer 2 networks, including Optimism, Base, Kraken’s Ink, and Unichain, using Wormhole’s Native Token Transfers (NTT) standard.

Notably, its decision to integrate Wormhole’s NTT standard follows plans to allow RLUSD to move natively across supported blockchains without relying on wrapped or synthetic versions.

Per the announcement, the move follows Ripple’s plans to preserve liquidity, maintain regulatory controls, and enhance security, while enabling a wide range of DeFi use cases across networks optimized for scalability and efficiency.

With this major expansion, RLUSD will emerge as the first regulated U.S.-based stablecoin to launch across the aforementioned L2 chains.

XRP in spotlight following latest Ripple development

Ripple disclosed the big move, highlighting its significance across its related assets. The company mentioned that the move aims to foster the utility of both RLUSD and XRP across the broader crypto ecosystem.

While the move has been ultimately welcomed by the XRP community, it positions the asset for more adoption, as it strengthens its role in the multichain economy.

As the move seeks to support wrapped XRP (wXRP), enabling premier liquidity pairs between RLUSD and wXRP across Optimism, Base, Ink, and Unichain, it positions XRP for more adoption, propelling its price toward a big upswing in the future.

Notably, users will be able to swap, lend, or make payments using XRP and RLUSD directly within DeFi applications on the chains, without needing to bridge back to the XRP Ledger or Ethereum mainnet.

According to the announcement, the rollout will begin with a test phase this December. As such, RLUSD is already live on Ethereum and the XRP Ledger following its recent issuance under a NYDFS Trust Charter.

While the company revealed it will roll out the multichain expansion on a larger scale next year, it further emphasized that the broader deployment will be subject to regulatory approval from the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS).