Put the $330M in Aave's contracts against everything else in the month and the distribution question answers itself. That single venue is 24.8% of Ethereum's $1.33B RLUSD float [5][2][1], 13.9% of the $2.37B outstanding across both chains [2], and 1.29 times the entire $256.5M that Ethereum added over the thirty days [3]. Add Ripple's own deployer wallet at $114M [6] and two addresses carry $444M, a third of the Ethereum supply [4].
The holder arithmetic sharpens it. At the $106K average balance Crypto Briefing reports for Ethereum [7], $1.33B implies something near 12,550 addresses [5], against more than 69,000 on XRPL whose $15K average multiplies out to $1.035B, close enough to the reported $1.04B to trust the series [6]. Take out Aave and the deployer and the remaining Ethereum holders average about $70.6K each [7], which is still four and a half times the XRPL wallet and nothing like a retail base.
The magnitude, though, needs care, because the same article does not reconcile with itself: 93% growth ending at $1.33B implies a starting point near $689M and a gain of roughly $641M [1][8], which is $384M more than the $256.5M it attributes to Ethereum [9]. Nor does the mint ledger close, with $1.39B minted less $606.8M burned leaving $783.2M net [3][10] against a reported market-cap increase of $303.7M, a $479.5M gap [11]. The direction is firm; the size is approximate.
The tidy version of the story starts with design. Ripple built this as a two-audience token at launch under its NYDFS trust charter, XRPL for cheap fast payment flow and Ethereum for composability [8], and for a while the design held, with $802M against $796M in late June 2026 [9]. What broke the tie was not payments and not retail; it was that Aave pays something for RLUSD and XRPL has no equivalent venue [10], so an issuer's home ledger turns out to be a marketing fact while a lending market's collateral list is a distribution fact. The corollary is that Ripple's own settlement minting is tilting toward the chain where its counterparties' other positions sit [10], directing liquidity effort into Ethereum plumbing rather than into giving XRPL the yield venue it lacks.
The counter-thesis is that $330M of deposits is a price rather than a franchise. Deposit balances chase rates, one protocol's supply cap or reserve-factor change can move a quarter of a chain's float in a week, and measuring a payments token by parked supply flatters the chain where money sits still over the chain where it moves. On that reading, XRPL's 69,000 wallets and cheaper finality [11] are the real product and Ethereum holds the inventory.
I would drop the collateral thesis if RLUSD's Ethereum share keeps climbing while Aave's share of that float falls, since broadening demand across many venues is a different story from one venue setting the split.
