RLUSD is more favored by Ethereum: 82% of Ripple stablecoin supply flows to the EVM ecosystem, while XRPL faces structural disadvantages.

Ripple's stablecoin RLUSD has rapidly expanded after one year of issuance, with a total supply reaching 1.26 billion USD. However, 82% (approximately 1.03 billion USD) is deployed on Ethereum, while the native XRP Ledger (XRPL) only holds 235 million USD, indicating a clear market preference for Ethereum's more mature Decentralized Finance ecosystem.

Ethereum has a strong liquidity of USD and a stablecoin system, with leading protocols such as Aave, Curve, and Uniswap enabling RLUSD to seamlessly integrate into the existing financial infrastructure. Currently, the USDC/RLUSD pool on Curve has approximately 74 million USD in liquidity, providing a low-slippage environment for institutional trading, arbitrage, and yield strategies. Therefore, for institutional investors with large capital scales, Ethereum is a more efficient and deeper choice.

In contrast, XRPL's DeFi infrastructure started later. The protocol-level AMM will not be launched until 2024, and the newly created liquidity pools still lack liquidity. Additionally, XRPL's design requires users to maintain XRP reserves and set trust lines, and may even require issuer authorization. While these mechanisms enhance compliance, they also raise the barriers to entry, limiting the natural spread of RLUSD on XRPL.

On-chain data further shows that RLUSD has strong real demand on Ethereum, rather than “passive issuance.” The weekly average trading volume of RLUSD on Ethereum is about 1 billion USD, far exceeding the 66 million USD at the beginning of the year; the weekly average number of transactions reaches 7,000, which is also significantly higher than the 240 transactions at the beginning of the year. The synchronized growth of trading volume and transaction numbers indicates that not only large funds are using RLUSD, but also the participation of retail investors and small to medium-sized institutions is increasing. Currently, the number of holders of RLUSD on Ethereum has reached 6,400, more than 8 times that of the beginning of the year.

These structural differences allow RLUSD to exhibit “permissionless growth” on Ethereum, while facing systemic resistance on XRPL. In the next six months, if the Ethereum ecosystem maintains its current level of activity, the supply of RLUSD on Ethereum is expected to rise to between 1.4 billion and 1.7 billion USD, while XRPL may still maintain a relatively low share.

If Ripple wants to enhance the competitiveness of XRPL, it needs to launch an AMM incentive program, improve the one-click trust line configuration of the wallet, and expand the scale of the native liquidity pool. In an optimistic scenario, XRPL could grow to a liquidity of 500 million USD, accounting for about a quarter of the total supply; however, if Ethereum further expands its leading advantage, 80%-90% of the supply of RLUSD may remain in the EVM system for a long time.

The core paradox currently faced by RLUSD is that in order for Ripple to become a leading stablecoin issuer globally, it must rely on its biggest competitive network—Ethereum—as its primary growth engine. (CryptoSlate)