Ripple Wires RLUSD Into the Treasury Software It Bought

Ripple’s stablecoin chief said treasury clients already move about $13 trillion a year, and he wants RLUSD in that flow. Jack McDonald, senior vice president of stablecoins, tied that figure to Ripple Treasury, the cash-management software built from GTreasury, in a September 12 interview. The Senate’s first floor test of the CLARITY Act is set for September 15.

The number is the volume those desks already handle in ordinary money. It is not a forecast for RLUSD, and Ripple has not said how much of it could move onchain.

The $13 Trillion Already Runs Through Ripple Software

McDonald described a book of roughly 1,200 corporate treasurers and CFOs who send funds across borders, between subsidiaries, and inside one country. “That customer base hadn’t been onchain,” he said. “They touch roughly 13 trillion dollars worth of transactions on an annual basis.”

That customer base hadn’t been onchain. They touch roughly 13 trillion dollars worth of transactions on an annual basis.

Jack McDonald, SVP of stablecoins at Ripple, September 12 interview

He called that set of clients a large opening for a dollar token. He did not claim those firms had agreed to replace wires, deposits, or in-house sweeps with RLUSD. The $13 trillion is the pipe. The stablecoin is the product Ripple wants to pour into it.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The figure: About $13 trillion is the annual transaction volume McDonald assigned to Ripple Treasury’s customer base.
• The users: He put that base at roughly 1,200 treasurers and CFOs moving money across borders, between units, and at home.
• The software: Ripple Treasury is the GTreasury platform after Ripple’s 2025 buy, now sold as one view of cash and digital assets.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Conversion: Ripple has not disclosed what share of that $13 trillion could settle in RLUSD.
• Commitments: There is no public roster of those 1,200 desks switching off bank rails.
• XRP share: McDonald’s pitch was a dollar token inside treasury workflows, not a mandate to hold XRP.

Stablecoins now total more than $300 billion across the market, and banks and payment firms are building around them. McDonald’s point was narrower. The customers he wants already sit inside Ripple’s own software.

What Ripple Bought for $1 Billion

On October 16, 2025, Ripple announced its $1 billion GTreasury purchase, a Chicago treasury-management vendor then trusted by more than 1,000 customers across 160 countries. That announcement-day count is the installed base Ripple paid for. McDonald’s later figure of about 1,200 treasurers and CFOs is the current book he is selling into. CEO Brad Garlinghouse said the deal was meant to let finance teams put trapped capital to work and process payments at once, rather than wait on slow rails.

GTreasury CEO Renaat Ver Eecke called the closing a turning point for treasury management and said the firm was moving from managing capital to activating it. The October release also named two earlier 2025 buys, prime broker Hidden Road and stablecoin platform Rail, as the other legs of the same stack. Repo access was supposed to ride Hidden Road. Instant payments were supposed to ride Ripple’s network. RLUSD is the dollar token in the middle.

RIPPLE’S PATH INTO THE CASH DESK

1. July 9, 2025: Ripple names BNY as primary custodian of RLUSD reserves, with the token issued through an NYDFS limited-purpose trust.
2. October 16, 2025: Ripple announces the $1 billion GTreasury deal, its third large purchase of the year after Hidden Road and Rail.
3. Early 2026: The GTreasury stack is sold as Ripple Treasury, a single console for cash, RLUSD, and XRP.
4. September 12, 2026: McDonald points RLUSD at that client base’s $13 trillion of annual transactions.
5. September 15, 2026: The Senate schedules cloture on the motion to proceed to the CLARITY Act at 2:15 p.m. ET.

Ripple Treasury’s own product copy now tells CFOs they can settle those transfers in RLUSD, keep dollar value in transit, and convert to local currency only at the far end. It claims three to five second settlement against wires that take several business days, and it puts Ripple Prime overnight repo, tokenized money-market funds, and a one-click XRPL fund portal on the same screen. The pitch is a cash desk that already exists, with a dollar token dropped into the workflow.

Idle Balances, Weekend Hours, and the Dollar Token

The software page lists the usual treasury complaints: working capital sitting idle after 5 p.m., multi-day FX windows, overseas pre-funding, and spreadsheets used to reconcile cash against digital assets. The offered fix is to treat digital-asset venues as “digital banks” on the same APIs GTreasury already uses for commercial banks. RLUSD is the unit that holds dollar value while that happens. XRP appears as a holding the desk can see, not as the currency on the invoice.

Ripple has made RLUSD the primary stablecoin in its payments business, McDonald said, and it can serve as the cash leg, settlement asset, and collateral in capital-markets trades. He named Franklin Templeton and DBS on tokenized money-market funds and lending, and said RLUSD can be posted as collateral through Ripple Prime. “When you want to go outside of that walled garden, that’s where stablecoins come into play,” he said, drawing a line between bank deposit tokens that stay inside one network and a dollar coin that can leave it.

RLUSD’s $2.4 Billion Against a $13 Trillion Pipe

Token Terminal data cited in McDonald’s interview put RLUSD’s circulating supply of $2.4 billion, up more than 50 percent over the prior month. About $1 billion of that supply is on the XRP Ledger. About $1.4 billion is on Ethereum. Daily activity rose from about $200 million at the start of 2026 to about $750 million in August, more than a threefold increase.

SCALE NEXT TO THE DESK

McDonald said use matters more than the headline cap. “What’s more exciting to us is the utility and the daily activity,” he said. Even at $750 million a day, RLUSD is a thin stream beside $13 trillion a year of client flow. Tether and Circle still dwarf it. The growth rate is the part Ripple is selling, not the stock of tokens.

Europe is next on his list, through a dual-issuance structure meant to fit the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets rules. “We would first and foremost like to offer RLUSD into Europe,” he said. “That’s a bit of a process to have dual issuance approved.” Ripple already has authorization in Luxembourg that he said could support a MiCA-compliant stablecoin, payments, custody, and trading business. Demand, he added, still favors dollar coins over euro or emerging-market tokens.

The token is also leaving its first two chains. McDonald said Ripple has added or received approval for Base, Ink, Optimism, and Unichain, and that it will go where demand is rather than chase retail meme-coin networks. Standard Custody, the NYDFS-chartered issuer, backs RLUSD one-for-one with dollars and cash equivalents, with BNY as primary reserve custodian and monthly attestations from an independent U.S. CPA firm.

XRP Stays Off the Invoice

XRP still clears fees and reserves on the ledger. It can sit in the same treasury view as cash and RLUSD. It is not the unit McDonald is pitching to those 1,200 desks for vendor payments, intercompany sweeps, or the cash leg of a trade. A CFO who already runs GTreasury can add a digital-asset account and never buy the volatile token.

That split is now visible in the product, not only in market talk. Banks and payment firms can take custody, payments software, and a NYDFS-supervised dollar coin as separate SKUs. The louder complaint among XRP holders is that Ripple can sell all three without the client ever touching XRP. The software makes that outcome easy. RLUSD holds the dollar. XRP pays the network toll.

McDonald still talked about the XRP Ledger as home for part of the supply and for fund portals. He did not present XRP as the corporate cash asset. If those desks move even a slice of cross-border flow onchain, the coin they will be asked to hold overnight is the stable one. The ledger still needs XRP for fees. The invoice does not.

A Credit Layer Built Around RLUSD

Clearpool, an institutional lender that lists $965 million in loans originated and $30 million in total value locked, is pitching institutional credit native to XRPL, with RLUSD as the credit asset and Hex Trust as custodian. The site still marks the XRP Ledger deployment as coming soon. Lending would use two proposed ledger features, single-asset vaults (XLS-65) and a native lending protocol (XLS-66), which still need validator approval before mainnet use.

WHAT THE CREDIT PITCH INCLUDES

• The asset: Loans would be denominated in RLUSD, not in XRP, with XRP still used for fees and reserves.
• The rails: Vaults and lending are meant to live in the ledger itself rather than in smart contracts on another chain.
• The partners: Cicada Partners is described as the credit-risk and borrower-sourcing shop; Ripple has been named as a limited partner in a related fintech credit fund, without a public dollar commitment.
• The token vote: Clearpool has put a full XRPL migration and a CPOOL-to-CLEAR swap to tokenholders, a live proposal, not a completed move.

That design matches McDonald’s cash-desk story. If corporate borrowers draw working capital in RLUSD, they have a reason to keep the dollar token for payments instead of cashing out to a bank wire. XRP still moves in the background. The credit is in dollars. Until validators flip the amendments on, this layer stays on a development network.

Tuesday’s Cloture Test Needs 60 Senate Votes

None of that CFO plumbing is waiting on a new U.S. market-structure law. The law still decides how those desks, and the venues they trade on, get classified. On September 15 the Senate votes at 2:15 p.m. ET on cloture for the motion to proceed to H.R. 3633, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act. That vote needs 60 senators. It does not pass the bill. It only opens debate.

The House passed its version 294-134 on July 17, 2025. The Senate Banking Committee advanced a text 15-9 on May 14, 2026. Republicans hold 53 seats, so a united GOP still needs at least seven Democrats. Late on September 13, Sens. Cynthia Lummis, John Boozman, and Tim Scott put out what they called their last offer, a substitute they said folds in 126 changes Democrats asked for, including a revised ethics title. The final CLARITY Act text is posted as a Senate substitute, not as signed law.

🚨 NEW LANGUAGE: Clarity Act

Chairman @SenatorTimScott is working with @SenLummis and @JohnBoozman to protect consumers, keep innovation in America, and strengthen national security.

The final text reflects over a year of bipartisan work with Democrats.https://t.co/y1GBWTZqSd

— U.S. Senate Banking Committee GOP (@BankingGOP) September 14, 2026

Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott said the draft gives Treasury more tools and that it is time to pass the bill. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, spent September 13 arguing the opposite. “As is, this bill does nothing to stop Trump’s crypto corruption or the use of crypto by bad actors,” he wrote. The replies under that post were a partisan brawl. They were not a debate about whether a treasurer should hold RLUSD in GTreasury.

THE SEPTEMBER 15 MATH

• The action: Cloture on the motion to proceed, not a final yes-or-no on the Act.
• The threshold: 60 votes; 53 Republican seats, so at least seven Democrats if no GOP defections.
• The fight: Ethics rules for officials with crypto holdings, plus leftover DeFi and stablecoin-yield disputes.
• The clock: Failure would not repeal H.R. 3633, but it would likely stall the bill past the 2026 midterms.

Patrick Witt, executive director of the White House Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, wrote that it was a bad day to be a Clarity Act doomer. Galaxy Digital CEO Mike Novogratz wrote that Clarity is not dead and that talks ran through the weekend. Both lines are about floor procedure. They are not about McDonald’s 1,200 desks.

A market-structure law would tell those desks which agency watches which token and which venue. It would not, by itself, move $13 trillion onto RLUSD. Ripple can already show CFOs a dollar coin, a three-to-five-second payment, and a treasury console it owns. Tuesday’s vote decides whether the Senate starts arguing over the rulebook those consoles would operate under.

Ripple has not said how much of that $13 trillion could move into RLUSD. The September 15 vote will not settle that either. It only decides whether the chamber begins debating the bill that would tell those cash desks which rules apply.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of public company statements, product pages, and legislative scheduling. It is informational only and is not investment, trading, legal, or tax advice, and it is not a recommendation to buy or sell XRP, RLUSD, CLEAR, CPOOL, or any other token or security. Readers who are considering a position in digital assets or a change to corporate treasury policy should consult a licensed financial adviser, counsel, or qualified treasurer before acting. Figures, bill text, vote times, and product statuses reflect the sources available on September 14, 2026, and can change with new attestations, governance votes, or Senate action.