The launch follows a memorandum of understanding signed by the two companies 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 management,” connecting Japanese companies to global dollar liquidity, Jack McDonald, Ripple’s senior vice president of stablecoins, said in a statement.
RLUSD is Ripple’s bet on the regulated end of the stablecoin market, and it is separate from XRP, the closely related token the company is best known for. Ripple has long touted RLUSD as an enterprise token for settlements and tokenization, the practice of issuing real-world assets on-chain.
The Japan launch extends this effort to Asia at a time when stablecoins are establishing formal rules in the United States, Europe and across the region, turning the dollar token market into a race for official approval as much as for users.
However, it remains to be seen whether RLUSD can close the gap between USDT and USDC. Approvals like Japan’s give it the qualifications to compete for institutional use, but it still has to convert that position into the volume and liquidity that its much larger rivals already possess.
