Ripple CEO Reaffirms XRP as 'North Star' With Half of RLUSD Issued on XRP Ledger

Only What Is Good for XRP

Ripple chief executive Brad Garlinghouse has restated the company's hierarchy in plain terms: XRP comes first. In an interview published on Wednesday, November 4, he addressed the question that has followed the company since its stablecoin Ripple USD (RLUSD) began drawing attention away from the token: whether a dollar-pegged asset inside the same firm dilutes the original bet. His answer was that RLUSD “is not intended to diminish what we internally call the North Star,” and that the operating rule at Ripple is simple: “We only do what is good for XRP.” He framed Ripple's task as widening what the token is used for, leaving the XRP price to the market. Garlinghouse tied the stablecoin's expansion and Ripple's business consolidation directly to greater liquidity and utility, arguing that more payment activity, in what the sector markets as PayFi, should run through the Ripple network. Which asset settles a given transaction depends on the payment corridor and the currency pair, he said, and the company's goal is that clients are satisfied with the experience either way. The position is not new. Since February, when he first called XRP Ripple's North Star, he has linked payments, prime brokerage, treasury management, custody and RLUSD to the token's development, and at XRP Community Day he named utility, trust and liquidity as the priorities across those business lines. In the November 4 remarks he went a step further, saying company decisions are filtered through a single test of whether they serve XRP. That framing settles the immediate question about RLUSD's role but leaves a larger one standing: whether institutional payment volume migrates on-chain at a scale that changes the token's economics. For the broader XRP ecosystem, the comments reaffirm an existing strategy rather than announce a shift, and the measurable commitments sit in the details below.

The stablecoin sits at the center of that argument. Garlinghouse said in the same interview that roughly half of all RLUSD is issued on the XRP Ledger, and that Ripple's aim is to lift liquidity, strengthen trust and raise utility through the token as far as possible. Ripple's official stablecoin product page lists payments, settlement and treasury management as RLUSD's use cases and states the token is fully backed 1:1 by cash deposits, US Treasuries and cash equivalents. Unlike algorithmic stablecoins, which hold their peg through game-theoretic mechanisms, RLUSD works as a real-world assets vehicle backed by dollar instruments, which is why Ripple positions it for clients settling dollar-denominated debt: the value is designed to hold steady, while the token itself trades at a market-determined value, so businesses moving dollar balances know the amounts owed and paid are in the same currency. On Tuesday, November 3, Garlinghouse sharpened the competitive framing in two posts on X, treating other stablecoins as rivals to RLUSD and saying he prefers stablecoin use cases that run on the XRP Ledger. The stablecoin is one piece of a broader consolidation. After Ripple completed $2.5 billion in acquisitions in 2025, he described 2026 as an integration year, pointing to growth in treasury management and the opportunity to migrate traditional finance payment activity on-chain. In prime brokerage, he estimated that only about 20% of the business is digitized and said he wants that share higher. In a Swell video shared on October 28, he set out a five-year institutional outlook, arguing XRP should be used wherever it suits client trading, since even a small share of client activity beats none. Outside Ripple, Anodos Finance, which builds trading and wallet tooling on the ledger, has held XRP in its treasury and paid staff in it since 2023, according to a May 31 statement by co-founder and chief executive Panos Mekras.

The 20% Digitization Benchmark

COINOTAG's read: the record Garlinghouse gave contains its own scorecard. If half of RLUSD already mints on the ledger and roughly 20% of prime brokerage is digitized, the strategy's testable claim is directional, with both shares set to rise if the North Star framing is more than language. No timeline or target was offered, and Ripple has not disclosed what share of its payment volume actually settles in the token rather than in RLUSD. That is the condition on which the argument rests: the reaffirmation becomes a measured outcome only when the on-chain share of activity moves. The comments also extend a running thread, after Garlinghouse earlier defended XRP's role while holders pressed for fair value, a debate our report Garlinghouse Defends XRP Role as Holders Demand Fair Value tracks in detail. Readers tracking market levels can follow our XRP technical analysis, and those new to the token can consult our guide on how to buy XRP.