Ripple's dollar-pegged stablecoin RLUSD made two concrete infrastructure moves this week: cross-chain routing platform Squid integrated RLUSD for single-transaction swaps across more than 100 blockchains and 20,000-plus tokens.
Ripple took a strategic stake in African payments giant Flutterwave at a $3.2Bn Series E valuation to embed RLUSD and the XRP Ledger into payment rails spanning 34 African markets.
Both moves are about the same underlying problem: a stablecoin is only as useful as the infrastructure that can move it. Ripple is solving that at two ends simultaneously: DeFi routing and real-world remittance corridors.
Despite these RLUSD developments, XRP USD still fell by -3.7% overnight, undoing most of the gains made over the past 10 days. XRP is trading at $1.16, with daily volume at $2.21Bn.
What Squid's RLUSD Integration Actually Does
Squid uses an intent-based routing system – think of it as a matchmaking layer where market makers on the destination chain fill swap orders using pooled liquidity, rather than requiring users to manually bridge or wrap tokens.
The result is that a user holding USDC on Ethereum can swap into RLUSD in a single transaction without touching multiple interfaces or paying separate bridging fees.
RLUSD is issued natively on both the XRP Ledger and Ethereum. Wormhole's Native Token Transfer (NTT) standard extends it to Ethereum Layer 2 networks, including Base, Optimism, and Unichain. Squid's routing layer sits above all of that, handling the path regardless of which chain RLUSD lives on at any given moment.
Lauren Berta, Ripple's stablecoin product lead, said the integration addresses a core scaling constraint: "As demand for RLUSD grows, it needs to move freely across the ecosystems where activity is happening.
Squid handles that routing layer, which opens up a lot for payments, DeFi, and treasury use cases." Squid's pseudonymous co-founder, Fig, noted that the team is also building payment widgets and SDKs that Ripple developers and partners can deploy directly.
Ripple is not a passive beneficiary here; the company participated in Squid's $6M funding round last month, bringing Squid's total raise to $13.5M alongside North Island Ventures and Axelar co-founder Georgios Vlachos, according to The Block.
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The Flutterwave Deal and the Africa Payments Opportunity
Flutterwave has processed more than one billion transactions worth over $50Bn across 34 African countries, making it one of the continent's most embedded payments infrastructure providers.