Ripple has kicked off beta testing for its new dollar-pegged stablecoin, Ripple USD (RLUSD), on the XRP Ledger and the Ethereum (ETH) mainnet.
The San Francisco payments company notes Ripple USD is not yet available for purchase and is still subject to regulatory approval.
The firm says the stablecoin will be fully backed by cash and cash equivalents and redeemable on a 1:1 basis for US dollars. Ripple also wants to eventually expand RLUSD’s availability to additional blockchains and decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols over time.
Ripple first rolled out plans for the new stablecoin back in April. In a court filing in May, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) argued that the planned stablecoin represented an “unregistered crypto asset.”
The court filing was related to the SEC’s securities lawsuit against Ripple, which commenced when the regulator sued the firm in late 2020 for allegedly selling XRP as an unregistered security.
Last year, US District Judge Analisa Torres handed Ripple a partial victory when she ruled that the company’s automated, open-market sales of XRP did not constitute security offerings, though she did side with the SEC’s claim regarding Ripple’s sales of XRP directly to institutional buyers.
In an orderfiled this week, District Judge Torres imposed a $125 million civil penalty against the San Francisco-based payments company for those institutional sales.
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