London is the stage for Ripple’s latest stable-asset advance this morning as the enterprise blockchain firm unveiled a strategic partnership with U.K.-based banking-as-a-service provider OpenPayd. The tie-up folds OpenPayd’s real-time payment rails, multicurrency accounts and virtual IBANs directly into Ripple Payments, extending instant EUR and GBP settlement to the product’s near-global payout network, which already covers more than 90 percent of daily FX flows and has processed over $70 billion in volume.
Liquidity on the XRP Ledger is also gathering pace. Ripple’s mid-June market-infrastructure brief pegged RLUSD spot turnover on the ledger at $500 million for the second quarter, making it the chain’s single largest fiat-backed stablecoin by volume. The same update pointed to growing multichain issuance—RLUSD is native on both XRPL and Ethereum—as evidence of developers’ appetite for on-chain dollars that can settle across disparate ecosystems without leaving enterprise-grade compliance behind.
Against that backdrop, today’s OpenPayd integration gives Ripple an immediate fiat on- and off-ramp inside the European Economic Area and the UK—jurisdictions that, collectively, accounted for almost 40 percent of RLUSD treasury flows in the first half of the year, according to company figures. McDonald called the partnership “a decisive step toward real-world adoption of stablecoins at scale,” arguing that institutional users prize “seamless interoperability between traditional infrastructure and digital assets” above all else.
The companies did not disclose commercial terms, but both sides hinted at a rapid rollout. OpenPayd said RLUSD minting, redemption and multicurrency treasury services will be available “through a single, unified API” later this quarter, while Ripple signalled further currency corridors are in the pipeline as client demand expands.
At press time, XRP traded at $2.17.
