In a significant move poised to reshape its position within the broader crypto landscape, Ripple announced a major infrastructure upgrade on Monday, December 15, centered on the expansion of its regulated, USD-pegged stablecoin, RLUSD. The company revealed its strategy to deploy RLUSD across several prominent Layer 2 (L2) networks, including Optimism, Base, Kraken's Ink, and Unichain. This ambitious multichain expansion is being executed utilizing Wormhole’s Native Token Transfers (NTT) standard.
The integration of Wormhole’s NTT standard is a critical component of Ripple's strategy, enabling RLUSD to move natively across the supported blockchains. Crucially, this eliminates the need to rely on wrapped or synthetic versions of the stablecoin, thereby preserving its inherent liquidity, maintaining robust regulatory controls, and significantly enhancing security across different environments. This strategic choice allows for a wide array of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) use cases across networks optimized for superior scalability and efficiency. With this deployment, RLUSD is positioned to become one of the first regulated, U.S.-based stablecoins to launch natively across these aforementioned L2 chains.
The broader objective of this major announcement is to substantially foster the utility of both RLUSD and XRP within the growing multichain crypto ecosystem. Ripple explicitly highlighted the role of this expansion in strengthening XRP's standing in the multichain economy. By leveraging the Wormhole NTT standard, the initiative will facilitate the creation of premier liquidity pairs between Wrapped XRP (wXRP) and RLUSD across Optimism, Base, Ink, and Unichain. This development is expected to dramatically increase the adoption pathways for XRP.
The practical benefit for users is profound: they will gain the capability to seamlessly swap, lend, or make payments using both XRP and RLUSD directly within various DeFi applications operating on these L2 chains. This removes a significant friction point, as users will no longer be required to bridge back to the XRP Ledger or the Ethereum mainnet for these transactions. Consequently, this positions XRP for potentially massive adoption, strengthening its utility as a foundational asset in a decentralized financial system. While the move has been largely applauded by the XRP community as a major catalyst, the initial rollout will commence with a testing phase this December. A full-scale multichain deployment is slated for the following year, contingent upon securing the necessary regulatory approval from the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), underscoring Ripple’s commitment to compliance-first expansion. This strategic push marks a defining moment for Ripple’s ecosystem, solidifying its commitment to institutional and DeFi integration.