The law creates pathways for “federal qualified” issuers, including uninsured national banks chartered by the OCC, and for state-qualified issuers under a capped regime.
If Ripple also secured a Federal Reserve master account, RLUSD reserves could be held directly at a Reserve Bank, and settlement could route through Fed services.
The near-term operating picture is straightforward. RLUSD already clears on public rails and is being used inside Ripple Payments with named customers.
If an OCC charter arrives, RLUSD issuance could migrate under the bank umbrella, aligning the product with the federal framework while keeping the token live on XRPL and Ethereum. That is not merely a theoretical shift. The OCC has chartered crypto-native national trust banks before, and public commenters are already weighing in on Ripple’s application.
Market structure will determine whether RLUSD sidelines or energizes XRP. If enterprise payment flows settle in RLUSD end-to-end, some volumes that previously relied on XRP as a bridge asset could track the dollar token instead, especially for corridors where both origin and destination liquidity is dollar-denominated.
Conversely, deeper RLUSD pools on XRPL give market makers a reason to hold and deploy XRP against RLUSD pairs, collect AMM fees, and support pathfinding across tokenized treasuries and fiat IOUs.
The OCC application states the trust bank would be a wholly owned subsidiary with a dedicated governance layer, a structure that can ring-fence activities and facilitate compliance under the stablecoin law’s issuer definitions.
To frame the trade-offs, the following table outlines three outcome paths and their practical effects on RLUSD and XRP, using current data points and the new law’s contours:
Second, XRPL’s fee design means even 100 million transactions would burn about 1,000 XRP, a small drain relative to supply, so utility hinges on liquidity breadth and spread capture rather than mechanical burns.
A charter accelerating institutional usage tilts those drivers toward XRPL, where routing makes economic sense, which is where XRP earns its keep.
If the charter lands, the next inflection is not a label change, it is whether RLUSD becomes a preferred settlement asset for regulated venues while XRP remains the native liquidity instrument on XRPL.
The upshot is that a charter would not erase XRP’s role on XRPL; it would formalize the line between a bank-issued dollar token used for settlement and a native asset used for liquidity, pathfinding, and network economics under a law that now defines stablecoin issuance at the federal level.
