According to a Tuesday press release shared by Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, investors who hold tokenized funds from BlackRock (BUIDL) and VanEck (VBILL) will now be able to exchange their shares for the Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin, which was launched last December on-chain.
This increases liquidity and flexibility while also bridging crypto with traditional finance.
This also potentially positions RLUSD as a go-to choice for institutional investors amid growing competition within the stablecoin sector.
‘Natural next step’
Jack McDonald, Ripple’s stablecoin head, has described the recent development “as a natural next step.”
In his social media post, Garlinghouse claims that the integration, which provides instant enterprise-grade on-chain liquidity, represents “real utility.”
Securitize CEO Carlos Domingo has also stated that getting into tokenization is “a natural step” for Ripple. Performing instant liquidations was also possible with other stablecoins, but in “a less effective way,” Domingo says. “At the end of the day, we need to have as much liquidity as possible and we need to have as much variety of stablecoins as possible,” he added.
Franklin Templeton partnership
The BlackRock-related announcement comes after Ripple announced a significant partnership with $1.5 trillion financial giant Franklin Templeton and DBS Bank. The collaboration is meant to bring repo markets on-chain with the help of the RLUSD stablecoin.
RLUSD’s growth
According to CoinGecko data, the market cap of RLUSD currently stands at $740 millon. While this growth is rather impressive, the stablecoin is still far from reaching the top 5.
Source: https://u.today/real-utility-ripple-ceo-shares-major-blackrock-related-announcement