Ripple is testing whether its stablecoin can replace manual payment processes that have slowed cross-border commerce for decades, and Singapore’s central bank is giving it a sandbox to prove it.
The company said in a note shared with CoinDesk on Wednesday that it is participating in BLOOM, a Monetary Authority of Singapore initiative designed to expand settlement capabilities for tokenized bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins.
As part of the plan, Ripple is partnering with Unloq, a supply chain fintech provider, to pilot a system where cross-border merchant payments using RLUSD are automatically released when predefined conditions, such as shipment verification, are met.
Traditional trade finance relies on layers of manual verification, documentary credits and correspondent banking relationships that can take days or weeks to settle. The Ripple-Unloq pilot uses Unloq’s SC+ platform to bundle trading obligations, settlement terms and funding workflows into a single execution layer, with RLUSD on the XRP Ledger handling real money movement.
Singapore has positioned itself as the regulatory testing ground for institutional digital asset use cases, with BLOOM specifically targeting the infrastructure layer rather than speculative products.
Entering the program indicates that MAS considers the RLUSD-on-XRPL stack credible enough for regulated experimentation, which is more important to Ripple’s business portfolio than any other exchange listing or payments corridor.
This is Ripple’s third major announcement in three weeks.
The company expanded Ripple Payments into a full-stack stablecoin infrastructure platform, obtained an Australian financial services license through an acquisition, and now has a central bank-backed pilot for trade finance.
Ripple is building the layer of regulatory and institutional credibility that turns RLUSD from a stablecoin with modest adoption into a settlement asset for enterprise use cases that require compliance and programmability.
