The launch fulfills a memorandum of understanding that the two companies signed in August 2025 and builds on a relationship that dates 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 businesses to global dollar liquidity, Jack McDonald, senior vice president of stablecoins at Ripple, said in a statement.
RLUSD is Ripple’s bet on the regulated end of the stablecoin market and is separate from XRP, the closely linked token for which the company is best known. Ripple has long presented RLUSD as an enterprise token for settlements and tokenization, the practice of issuing real-world assets on-chain.
The launch in Japan extends that effort to Asia at a time when stablecoins are generating formal rules in the US, 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 will be able to close the gap between USDT and USDC. Approvals like Japan’s give it the credentials to compete for institutional use, but it has yet to convert that position into the volume and liquidity that its much larger rivals already have.
