Ripple’s RLUSD Stablecoin Launches on Aave

Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin is off to a strong start in decentralized finance (DeFi), attracting almost $19 million to its Aave lending pool and $4.68 million in loans taken.

The momentum comes after a sluggish start, in which nearly a day went by with just $360 in the till.

On April 21, Aave announced in an X post that Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin could be lent and borrowed on Aave’s V3 Ethereum Core marketplace.

The supply cap for RLUSD has been set at 50 million, and the borrowing cap at 5 million.

Assuming interest continues to grow, the market is a good step into Ethereum-based DeFi for Ripple’s stablecoin, which has accrued a market capitalization of almost $300 million since its Dec. 17 launch.

That makes it the No. 19 stablecoin by market cap. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse told Bloomberg in March that his goal is to have RLUSD become a top-five stablecoin by year’s end.

Currently, the fifth-largest stablecoin is DAI, with a $3.2 billion market cap, according to CoinGecko. Tether’s USDT leads the sector with a market cap of $145 billion. In second place is Circle and Coinbase’s USDC, with a market cap of $61 billion.

While Ripple is looking to attract institutional use of RLUSD — it chose to get a license from the notoriously tough New York Department of Financial Services for that reason — it has been working on making inroads into DeFi since January. That’s when it announced it was working with Chainlink, by far the top oracle provider with $30 billion in total value secured.

“​​By leveraging the Chainlink standard, we bring trusted data onchain, further strengthening RLUSD’s utility across both institutional and decentralized applications,” Ripple Senior Vice President of Stablecoins Jack McDonald said at the time.