BNY adds XRP and RLUSD custody, tests XRPL invoice finance

BNY, America's oldest bank, is expanding its work with Ripple: it will hold XRP and the RLUSD stablecoin for institutional clients and explore financing supplier invoices on the XRP Ledger. The companies announced the plans on Tuesday, The Block reports.

What BNY and Ripple agreed

• Custody: XRP and RLUSD join BNY's institutional custody platform. The bank already acts as the main reserve custodian for RLUSD and has a custody relationship with Ripple Prime, the company's prime brokerage.
• Mint and redeem: the partners intend to let BNY clients create and redeem RLUSD directly through the bank, rather than through an exchange.
• Trade finance: with working-capital provider C2FO, they will test moving supply-chain receivables on-chain. Suppliers would get paid within seconds against invoices a buyer has already approved, instead of waiting days for a bank transfer. Capital providers fund the payments, and the original invoice terms and due dates stay the same.

"We're moving past the initial issuance of assets onchain," Ripple president Monica Long said, describing the next step as making tokenized assets usable for payments and collateral. It is the kind of real-world use our explainer on what tokenization is describes.

Robinhood joins in

Ripple separately announced a partnership with Robinhood covering stablecoins, treasury and institutional trading. RLUSD is already live on Robinhood Chain and Bitstamp by Robinhood and should reach the main Robinhood app later this year. Robinhood plans to use RLUSD for institutional settlement on the XRP Ledger and to adopt Ripple Treasury for cash management and payments.

Context

• RLUSD: about $2.5 billion in market value since its December 2024 launch, more than $1 billion of it issued on the XRPL. New to dollar tokens? See what a stablecoin is.
• XRPL: over 4.6 billion transactions processed, with settlement in three to five seconds, according to Ripple. Our guide to what XRP is explains the ledger and the token.
• Regulation: Ripple recently won final OCC approval for a national trust bank that will manage RLUSD reserves.

What's next

Both the BNY services and the C2FO pilot are still in development, and the companies have not said when they will go live. CoinDesk noted this morning that Ripple's bank win has so far done little for the XRP price.