DriveWealth to use Ripple's RLUSD on XRP Ledger for settlement, starting in Europe

The 100-plus figure counts partners DriveWealth already serves: fintech firms, digital wallets and financial institutions that use its brokerage infrastructure to offer access to U.S. markets ^[3]. According to crypto.news's account of the companies' release, the companies did not disclose how many of those partners will route funding through RLUSD or when the U.S. stage starts ^[4].

In our view the product is a schedule fix, and a narrow one. DriveWealth already offers 24/5 trading, and CEO Naureen Hassan said the company wants account funding to operate on a schedule that supports clients using that service ^[7]. A market open 24 hours a day for five days is open 120 of a week's 168 hours, about 71% ^[14], while the release describes bank transfers as bound by windows and cutoff times ^[13]. U.S. equities settle one business day after trading, and cross-border dollar transfers can take longer, a gap the companies say can tie up capital and increase funding needs ^[6]. Hassan said customers' capital could keep working "instead of sitting idle overnight or over a weekend" ^[8].

The claim is a reduction. Stablecoin deposits can convert into cash in near real time, and the release frames that as reducing the need to wait for an international bank wire ^[5]. Ripple's part of the build is the mint-and-burn tooling ^[11], an extension of the Ripple Mint launch in July that gave approved customers tools to issue, redeem, transfer and monitor RLUSD ^[12].

We think the likeliest outcome is a slow start: a few partners with large collateral balances and long wire waits move first, and the rest watch the European numbers. The counter-thesis is that one integration reaches the whole network at once, so adoption could be fast once the first few move. A third version is that Europe works and the U.S. stage slips. We would be wrong on the slow start if early European disclosures show most of the 100-plus partners funding through RLUSD. The test is the share of partners that fund collateral through RLUSD in a given month.

The financing leg is a further hedge. Equity financing through Ripple Prime is described as exploratory ^[10], so that part of the package is not yet a commitment.