Moody's has assigned Ripple's RLUSD an A2 long-term deposit rating and a P-1 short-term rating. The rating lands as RLUSD growth raises a question for XRP: whether the token captures any of the value the stablecoin creates.
Ripple's RLUSD earned Moody's A2 long-term deposit rating and its highest P-1 short-term rating. The assessment covers RLUSD issued on XRP Ledger and Ethereum, giving institutions another benchmark for evaluating the dollar-pegged stablecoin.
The rating arrives alongside Ripple's final approval to establish a national trust bank under the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Ripple says the bank will manage RLUSD reserves and provide institutional custody services, while Bank of New York Mellon remains the stablecoin's primary reserve custodian.
Why RLUSD growth may not lift XRP
Moody's rating gives institutional risk teams a formal credit assessment to use in their evaluations. Standard Custody & Trust Company, a New York-regulated subsidiary, will still issue RLUSD, and the trust bank will manage segregated reserves and act as collateral trustee.
For XRP, the opportunity depends on what institutions do after adopting RLUSD. Every transaction on XRP Ledger requires XRP to pay network fees, and accounts need XRP to satisfy reserve requirements. Greater RLUSD activity could generate incremental XRP utility, although these requirements alone may create limited demand.
Cross-currency payments offer the more substantial opening, because institutions could use XRP as a bridge asset when converting between currencies. RLUSD, however, can settle directly without an institution buying XRP for the entire payment value, and transfers on Ethereum do not require XRP for gas.
The BUSD and BNB comparison
As a result, RLUSD's market cap could grow substantially without generating proportional demand for XRP. Cryptonews points to Binance's historical BUSD and BNB ecosystem as a comparison: BNB provides utility through network fees and trading-fee discounts, plus a token-burning mechanism that reduces supply over time.
Ripple starts from a different position. Cryptonews offers a hypothetical in which RLUSD grows from $2.5 billion to $25 billion in market cap, a tenfold expansion. That would not imply a tenfold increase in XRP's price, because the outcome would depend on transaction volumes, network activity, institutional integrations, and the proportion of payments that actually use XRP.
Stablecoin growth alone would not reproduce BNB's exchange utility or supply burns, so Ripple would need to make XRP more integral to the activity surrounding RLUSD.
Source: Cryptonews
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