Ripple Trust Bank Charter and Coinbase Rollout Strengthen RLUSD’s Regulated-Dollar Bid
Oct. 29, 2026 • Article • Digital Assets
Ripple’s final federal trust bank charter, a Moody’s investment-grade rating for RLUSD and a planned expansion of the stablecoin’s availability on Coinbase have strengthened its position as a regulated digital dollar. Coinbase said Global Exchange access, including eligibility to use RLUSD as trading collateral, will follow its initial retail and prime rollout. Moody’s assigned RLUSD an A2 long-term deposit rating and a P-1 short-term rating, the first investment-grade rating it has given a stablecoin.
The distinctions behind those developments matter. Ripple National Trust Bank manages RLUSD’s reserve collateral, but the legal issuer remains Standard Custody & Trust Company, a New York-regulated Ripple subsidiary. The national trust bank is uninsured and cannot take commercial retail deposits or extend credit. Moody’s also noted that holders do not currently own the underlying reserves directly and that statutory bankruptcy protections depend on implementation of the GENIUS Act, whose rules take effect in January 2027.
Ripple’s federal trust bank approval, a Moody’s investment-grade rating and a broader Coinbase distribution plan have advanced the case for its dollar stablecoin, RLUSD. Together, the developments address oversight, credit assessment and market access. They do not, however, make RLUSD a bank deposit or resolve every question about holders’ rights to its reserves.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency gave final approval to Ripple National Trust Bank on October 26, 2026, according to the OCC and Ripple. Moody’s subsequently assigned RLUSD an A2 long-term deposit rating and a P-1 short-term deposit rating, marking the first time the agency had assigned an investment-grade rating to a stablecoin. Coinbase has confirmed that access for Global Exchange customers, including eligibility to use RLUSD as trading collateral, will follow an initial retail and prime rollout.
What Ripple’s trust bank charter covers
Ripple National Trust Bank operates under OCC charter #25364 as an uninsured national trust institution. Its role in the RLUSD structure is to act as reserve collateral trustee and manager. It is not the stablecoin’s legal issuer: that remains Standard Custody & Trust Company, a Ripple-owned limited-purpose trust company regulated by the New York State Department of Financial Services.
That division of responsibilities is important. A federal trust bank charter gives Ripple a federally supervised institution for managing reserve collateral, but it does not turn RLUSD into an FDIC-insured deposit. The bank cannot accept commercial retail deposits or extend credit, and it has no FDIC insurance coverage.
Ripple is the second major stablecoin operator to receive final federal trust bank approval after Circle’s First National Digital Currency Bank received approval in July 2026. The charter adds a federal supervisory dimension to Ripple’s arrangements without displacing the New York-regulated entity that issues RLUSD.
Rating and reserves: strengths and limits
RLUSD’s reserve structure targets 103% coverage, with assets invested predominantly in short-duration U.S. government securities and cash. BNY is the primary custodian. The target describes the intended reserve coverage; it should not be read as a guarantee that holders have direct ownership of those assets.
That distinction features in Moody’s analysis. Despite its investment-grade ratings, the agency noted that RLUSD holders currently lack direct ownership of the underlying reserves. It also said the issuer is not yet statutory bankruptcy-remote, pending implementation of the GENIUS Act. The ratings therefore provide an external assessment of RLUSD while leaving the legal treatment of reserves a material consideration for users.
On October 21, the OCC finalized rules implementing the GENIUS Act, which take effect on January 18, 2027. The framework establishes rules for permitted payment stablecoin issuers and excludes required reserves from an issuer’s bankruptcy estate. Until those provisions take effect, the distinction identified by Moody’s remains relevant to any comparison between RLUSD and other forms of regulated dollar holdings.
Distribution expands beyond Ripple
Coinbase’s planned Global Exchange availability could extend RLUSD’s use beyond purchases and holdings by making it eligible as trading collateral. Coinbase said that step would follow the initial retail and prime rollout; the provided information does not establish that Global Exchange collateral use is already live. Distribution is central to whether a stablecoin becomes useful across trading and settlement, rather than remaining confined to its issuer’s own services.
The Coinbase relationship also sits alongside an existing commercial arrangement in the stablecoin market: Coinbase derives a significant share of its recurring subscription and services revenue from a reserve-interest-sharing agreement with Circle tied to USDC. The research does not establish that RLUSD will displace that arrangement, and wider availability alone does not demonstrate a shift in customer adoption.
Other institutions are extending RLUSD’s potential uses. At Ripple Swell 2026, Robinhood announced an expanded partnership with Ripple to settle institutional trades in RLUSD on the XRP Ledger and launch the stablecoin on Robinhood Chain. BNY separately announced that it would expand its Ripple partnership to custody RLUSD and XRP on its Digital Asset Custody platform, while exploring tokenized trade finance on the XRP Ledger. The trade-finance work remains exploratory.
Ripple also said at Swell that it expected an annualized product revenue run rate of $900 million by year-end 2026 across payments, custody, prime brokerage and stablecoin operations. That is a company-wide projection across several products, not a reported RLUSD revenue figure. For RLUSD, the test ahead is whether new channels translate into sustained use as the federal stablecoin rules take effect—and whether the resulting protections address the reserve-rights limitations Moody’s identified.
Mastercard and Visa are extending stablecoin technology into the systems that settle card payments between financial institutions, while leaving the consumer checkout experience largely unchanged. Mastercard completed its acquisition of stablecoin infrastructure provider BVNK in August 2026 and has expanded its network’s settlement options to include regulated stablecoins. Visa, meanwhile, is working with Stripe-owned Bridge and Lead Bank on on-chain settlement for card programs. The shift became more concrete in September, when SoFi Bank moved its credit and debit card issuing portfolio to live settlement using its bank-issued SoFiUSD. That portfolio represents more than $25 billion in annualized card volume, a measure distinct from the value settled in stablecoins. Visa separately reported an annualized stablecoin settlement run rate exceeding $25 billion in October. The networks’ initiatives target the back-end movement and reconciliation of funds, including periods when traditional bank settlement rails are unavailable; they do not require merchants to accept cryptocurrency.
The European Central Bank has launched Pontes, a bridge connecting tokenised-asset platforms to the Eurosystem’s TARGET Services for wholesale settlement in central bank money. The arrangement enables atomic delivery-versus-payment settlement, in which an asset and its payment move together. It does not yet make wholesale settlement available around the clock: Pontes depends on T2 operating hours and requires tokenised central bank money balances to be defunded at the end of the day. ECB Executive Board member Piero Cipollone says the Eurosystem plans to extend Pontes operating hours substantially by mid-2027 and reach 24/7/365 availability in 2028. Separately, the Bank for International Settlements’ Project Agorá has tested cross-border payments using a shared programmable ledger that brings tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves into a single settlement process. Both initiatives address delays and liquidity demands in wholesale payments, but neither makes continuous, cross-border settlement available today.
Project Agorá’s real-value testing settled 30 live, multi-currency transactions worth approximately CHF 800,000, with atomic settlement averaging about 80 seconds. The tests involved 28 commercial institutions and five central banks. The result shows how tokenised commercial bank deposits and central bank reserves could support faster cross-border settlement, though it does not establish that settlement latency has been eliminated. The project’s prototype found that tokenisation did not change the legal character or regulatory obligations of deposits and reserves. Its design also let participating institutions conduct compliance checks concurrently. Seven more commercial banks joined in September 2026, taking private-sector participation to nearly 50 institutions. At Sibos in October, banking executives described the testing pipeline as a step towards production trials alongside the European Central Bank’s Pontes platform. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York did not participate in the live test transactions, an important qualification for the US dollar tests.
Ripple’s final federal trust bank charter, a Moody’s investment-grade rating for RLUSD and a planned expansion of the stablecoin’s availability on Coinbase have strengthened its position as a regulated digital dollar. Coinbase said Global Exchange access, including eligibility to use RLUSD as trading collateral, will follow its initial retail and prime rollout. Moody’s assigned RLUSD an A2 long-term deposit rating and a P-1 short-term rating, the first investment-grade rating it has given a stablecoin. The distinctions behind those developments matter. Ripple National Trust Bank manages RLUSD’s reserve collateral, but the legal issuer remains Standard Custody & Trust Company, a New York-regulated Ripple subsidiary. The national trust bank is uninsured and cannot take commercial retail deposits or extend credit. Moody’s also noted that holders do not currently own the underlying reserves directly and that statutory bankruptcy protections depend on implementation of the GENIUS Act, whose rules take effect in January 2027.
Ramp partnered with Stripe and Bridge in July 2026 to deploy stablecoin rails for business bill payments and yield-bearing stablecoin accounts funded through standard fiat bank accounts. The arrangement shows how stablecoins can be incorporated into familiar payment workflows without requiring businesses to fund every transaction with digital assets. The economics depend on more than the cost of moving a token on-chain. Stripe charges merchants 1.5% for stablecoin checkout transactions, versus its standard card-processing fee of 2.9% plus $0.30; neither figure establishes the price of Ramp’s bill-payment service. Businesses receiving fiat may also face foreign-exchange and off-ramp costs, typically 0.3% to 2.0% when converting into local banking systems. Domestic clearing networks and compliance checks remain part of end-to-end delivery. Bridge’s issuance and transfer tools, alongside its conditional U.S. trust-bank approval, illustrate the infrastructure behind those payments—but not the elimination of every payment cost.
StraitsX has opened onboarding for digital payment token providers across more than 100 markets through an expanded card-issuing architecture developed with Visa. Integration documentation published on 26 October 2026 describes a multi-BIN model that combines issuing sponsorship, transaction authorization, compliance screening and fiat clearing. The approach lets participating providers build stablecoin-backed card products while merchants continue to receive conventional fiat payments through Visa’s network. StraitsX says its card gross transaction value rose 40-fold year on year from Q4 2024 to Q4 2025, while cards issued across Asia increased 83-fold. On-chain issuer telemetry recorded monthly card transaction volume of $310 million to $438 million through October 2026. The company’s stated $6 billion annualized card transaction figure is distinct from its cumulative $70 billion in processed stablecoin volume. StraitsX and Visa have also scheduled demonstrations of agentic payments for November 2026.