RLUSD has overtaken PYUSD, and the XRP crowd is popping champagne again. Hold on—I took a closer look on-chain, and the growth isn’t on XRPL at all.
On-chain snapshot (11/13 18:16, UTC+8): Ethereum’s contract totalSupply is about 1.857 billion, while the obligations of XRPL’s issuing address are about 829 million. On 10/14, DefiLlama still showed 1.366 billion on Ethereum and 1.033 billion on XRPL.
RLUSD’s total supply has grown by about 300 million net in a month. Ethereum is up 490 million, while XRPL is actually down by more than 200 million. XRPL’s share has fallen from 43% to around 31%.
So the claim that “the bigger RLUSD gets, the more valuable XRP becomes” has gone the other way this month: all the new dollars went to Ethereum, while RLUSD on XRPL continues to shrink. Even if it all stayed on XRPL, each transaction burns only about 0.00001 XRP. The reserve interest goes to Ripple, not XRP holders. When a stablecoin grows, it’s the issuer’s balance sheet that benefits first—not the XRP in your wallet.
And about the “overtaking” itself: CoinGecko currently puts RLUSD at about 2.70 billion, USDG at about 2.67 billion, and PYUSD at about 2.66 billion. The gap between the three is less than 1.5%, so a few tens of millions in redemptions in a single day could reshuffle their rankings. Also, this crossover was mainly driven by PYUSD declining: according to DefiLlama, it fell by about 115 million between 11/11 and 11/13, and has shrunk from about 2.86 billion a month ago to around 2.66 billion now. PYUSD’s decline handed RLUSD a higher ranking; RLUSD didn’t suddenly take off.
One thing I couldn’t verify: who holds the 490 million newly added on Ethereum, or whether it’s actually circulating or sitting in market makers’ or institutions’ inventories. Neither DefiLlama nor totalSupply can tell. RLUSD’s growth is real, but don’t treat it as demand data for XRP.
#RLUSD #XRP