The launch builds on a memorandum of understanding the two firms signed in August 2025 and builds on a relationship dating back to 2016, when Ripple and SBI began working together on cross-border payments and blockchain infrastructure in Asia.
RLUSD will “serve as a bridge for payments, tokenization and collateral,” connecting Japanese companies with global dollar liquidity, Jack McDonald, Ripple’s senior vice president of stablecoins, said in a statement.
RLUSD is Ripple’s venture into the regulated end of the stablecoin market, and it is separate from XRP, the closely related token for which the company is best known. Ripple has long touted RLUSD as a corporate token for settlements and tokenization, the practice of issuing real-world assets on-chain.
The Japan launch extends that effort to Asia at a moment when stablecoins are drawing formal regulations in the US, Europe and across the region, making the dollar-token market a race for official approval as much as for users.
However, whether RLUSD can close the gap on USDT and USDC remains to be seen. Approvals like Japan’s give it the credentials to compete for institutional use, but it still needs to convert that status into the volume and liquidity its much larger rivals already command.
