Moody's Assigns A2 Rating to Ripple's $2.6B RLUSD Stablecoin

By Nathan Brooks

Moody's Ratings has assigned an A2 long-term deposit rating and a P-1 short-term rating to Ripple USD (RLUSD), the $2.6 billion stablecoin issued by Ripple subsidiary Standard Custody & Trust Company. The rating, requested by the issuer, landed on Tuesday, one day after the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency granted final approval to Ripple National Trust Bank.

A2 sits sixth-highest on Moody's long-term scale; P-1 is the agency's top short-term grade. Moody's grounded both in the composition of RLUSD's reserves, which are held mainly in U.S. Treasury bills, other short-term U.S. government assets and cash, the bulk of it with custodian BNY. The issuer targets 103% coverage of tokens in circulation, and eligible institutional holders can redeem at par within two business days.

The agency did not give a clean bill. Moody's flagged gaps in holder protection, noting that Standard Custody is not a bankruptcy-remote entity and that RLUSD holders currently hold no direct ownership interest in the reserves. The GENIUS Act, the U.S. stablecoin statute due to take effect in 2027, will partially close that gap by excluding required reserves from an issuer's bankruptcy estate.

What does the dual approval change for issuers?

The combined effect of the rating and the OCC charter puts RLUSD under both federal and state supervision, a structure few stablecoin issuers have achieved. Ripple National Trust Bank will manage RLUSD's reserves and act as their collateral trustee, while Standard Custody continues to issue the token under New York Department of Financial Services oversight.

For practitioners, the arrangement offers a template for what regulated issuance looks like once the GENIUS Act takes force: a rated instrument, a national trust bank as reserve custodian and trustee, and par redemption inside a two-business-day window. It also gives institutional allocators the credit opinion many compliance policies require before touching a tokenized dollar.

RLUSD remains a small player in scale terms. Its roughly $2.6 billion market capitalization, per CoinGecko, represents less than 1% of a stablecoin market worth approximately $300 billion.

The institutional build-out behind the rating

Ripple has positioned RLUSD squarely at institutions rather than retail users, and the pipeline reflects that. Earlier this month, Standard Chartered began offering institutional custody of RLUSD through its Dubai branch and said it is working with Ripple and LMAX Group on a "collateral mirroring" setup. That structure would let clients deploy the stablecoin as trading collateral without moving it off the bank's books — an operational efficiency that matters for treasury desks posting margin across venues.

In November 2025, Ripple paired with Mastercard, WebBank and Gemini to explore settling fiat transactions on the Gemini Credit Card using RLUSD on the XRP Ledger, pending regulatory approvals. At that point RLUSD had just crossed a $1 billion market cap, ranking it the 11th-largest stablecoin according to DefiLlama — meaning the token has roughly doubled in capitalization in under two months.

Launched in December 2024 on Ethereum and the XRP Ledger, RLUSD has scaled from a $1 billion instrument to a rated, dually supervised $2.6 billion one within a year.

The near-term watch item is implementation: the GENIUS Act's bankruptcy-estate exclusion does not bite until 2027, leaving a window in which RLUSD's rated protections rest on reserve quality and supervision rather than statutory segregation.