Ripple’s long-term direction may be shifting away from payment messaging and toward an institutional digital-dollar network. The source article argues that Ripple is not recreating the Eurodollar market in legal form, but it may be assembling a crypto-native analogue built around RLUSD, XRP, the XRP Ledger (XRPL), and Ripple Prime to handle settlement, collateral mobility, cross-border funding, and non-bank intermediation.
The Eurodollar market was more than dollars held overseas
The piece explains that Eurodollars were not euros and not stacks of US cash moved abroad. They were US dollar deposits booked at banks outside the United States, especially in London. Because these liabilities sat outside the domestic US banking perimeter, banks could use them for dollar lending and interbank recycling without facing the same reserve requirements, deposit insurance costs, or interest-rate constraints found inside the US system.
Citing the St. Louis Fed, the article says the Eurodollar market grew 252% from 1964 to 1969, rising from $75 billion to $264 billion in 2020 dollars. BIS research is also referenced, noting that by the fourth quarter of 1974, offshore dollar claims on and liabilities to non-banks had reached 9% of comparable domestic US banking activity. In the article’s framing, the system drew its strength from four traits: dollar denomination, offshore booking, interbank reuse, and credit creation.
Ripple is putting together a different dollar stack
The comparison becomes relevant because Ripple appears to be targeting a similar problem: how dollar exposure can move, be funded, pledged, and settled across borders without relying entirely on correspondent banking rails. The first component is RLUSD. Ripple describes RLUSD as a dollar-backed stablecoin for institutional use, issued by Standard Custody, a limited purpose trust company supervised by the New York Department of Financial Services. Ripple’s transparency page showed $1.731 billion in circulating RLUSD and $1.833 billion in reserve funds as of May 28, 2026.
The article notes that RLUSD is not fractional-reserve bank money, which limits any direct Eurodollar comparison. Even so, it can still operate as a settlement asset, margin asset, treasury tool, and payments rail if enough institutional venues support it. The second component is custody and reserve infrastructure. BNY acts as the primary reserve custodian for RLUSD and provides transaction banking services tied to the stablecoin’s operations, giving the product a more credible redemption and settlement framework for institutional users.
Hidden Road and Ripple Prime add the intermediation layer
The third major piece is prime brokerage. Ripple acquired Hidden Road for $1.25 billion and said the deal made it the first crypto company to own and operate a global multi-asset prime broker. Ripple said Hidden Road clears $3 trillion annually across markets and serves more than 300 institutional customers. That matters because Hidden Road was not a wallet provider, exchange, or payments app. It sat between institutions, venues, liquidity providers, credit lines, and collateral flows.
Ripple also said it would inject billions of dollars into the business to expand prime brokerage, clearing, and financing. RLUSD, according to the company, would become collateral across Hidden Road products and support cross-margining between digital assets and traditional markets. After the transaction closed, Ripple said Hidden Road had become Ripple Prime and that the business had grown threefold since the acquisition announcement. Ripple also said RLUSD was already being used as collateral across several prime brokerage products, while some derivatives clients had chosen to hold balances in RLUSD.
XRP may fit better as collateral than as a dollar substitute
The article’s argument is that XRP does not need to replace the dollar to matter in institutional finance. A more realistic role would be as collateral, bridge liquidity, settlement inventory, or a ledger-native asset that moves value between dollar instruments, exchanges, venues, and counterparties. That places XRP closer to the collateral layer of wholesale finance than to the core definition of money.
To support that view, the piece cites Bitnomial, which said its CFTC-regulated exchange and clearinghouse accept RLUSD and XRP as margin collateral for institutional clients trading leveraged perpetuals, futures, and options. OKX adds another part of the picture. Ripple and OKX said RLUSD can trade across more than 280 spot pairs, support perpetual futures and margin collateral in selected markets, and enable deposits and withdrawals through XRPL along with direct minting and redemption.
In that structure, RLUSD supplies the dollar leg, XRP and XRPL handle ledger-native settlement and collateral routing, Ripple Prime provides credit, clearing, and institutional balance-sheet access, and exchanges and derivatives venues supply trading demand. The source article therefore argues that Ripple may be building a parallel dollar-liquidity network where tokenized dollars and digital collateral circulate through non-bank infrastructure rather than through the traditional correspondent banking model.
Closer to a synthetic Eurodollar than a direct replica
The article is careful about the limits of the analogy. Eurodollars were unsecured bank liabilities and could support credit creation through bank balance sheets. RLUSD is fully backed by reserves and does not have the same monetary elasticity. Eurodollars were created by banks in offshore branches, while Ripple’s model relies on trust-company issuance, stablecoin reserves, regulated custody, prime brokerage, and blockchain settlement.
That is why the author says “synthetic Eurodollar” is the better label. If RLUSD becomes a collateral and settlement asset inside Ripple Prime, and XRP becomes accepted as collateral or settlement inventory across more venues, Ripple’s business model could move away from payment rails and toward wholesale financial intermediation. In that case, the most important product may not be XRP alone, but the institutional balance-sheet system built around it.