XRP Ledger Turns Over RLUSD 19×: Ethereum Manages 11×
RLUSD moved more dollars on the XRP Ledger than on Ethereum in October while sitting on a smaller balance, and the only wallet-level data available points to very few senders.
Key Takeaways
- XRPL led Ethereum in October RLUSD transfer volume
- Turnover ran about 19× supply versus 11×
- Ten wallets sent about 82% of measured value
- RLUSD volume is not an XRP demand figure
The headline numbers come from Token Relations, which reported in a November 6 research post that RLUSD transfers in October totalled $20.1 billion on XRPL and $15.4 billion on Ethereum. The gap is larger than the raw totals suggest, because XRPL carried the smaller RLUSD balance for the whole month.
A smaller base turned over faster
Dividing monthly transfers by today’s supply would flatter whichever chain has been issuing or receiving tokens most recently. Supply shifts between the two networks as RLUSD is minted, redeemed and bridged, so the fair denominator is the balance that was actually in circulation while the transfers happened.
Coindoo took the 31 daily October readings for each chain from DefiLlama’s historical RLUSD dataset, averaged them, and divided each network’s reported transfer volume by that average.
| Measure | XRPL | Ethereum |
|---|---|---|
| Reported gross transfers | $20.1B | $15.4B |
| Average daily supply | $1.060B | $1.407B |
| Transfers ÷ supply | ≈19× | ≈11× |
Sources: Token Relations (transfers), DefiLlama daily supply observations; calculations by Coindoo. Figures rounded; RLUSD assumed at $1. Coindoo calculated the supply averages independently and did not reconstruct the underlying transfers.
A turnover ratio counts movement, not money changing owners. The same 100 RLUSD passing through ten wallets produces 1,000 RLUSD of transfer volume whether it settles ten invoices or circulates between accounts controlled by one firm. On XRPL, where the balance is smaller, a higher ratio is what you would expect if a modest pool of tokens is being reused by active payment or trading desks.
Ethereum’s lower ratio has a plausible structural explanation. Stablecoin balances there tend to sit in lending markets, liquidity pools and exchange reserves, where dollars are parked rather than pushed around. The data used here does not break RLUSD down by use, so that remains an inference, but it fits the numbers. Either way, the ratio says XRPL’s RLUSD is busier per dollar held; it says nothing about who is keeping it busy.
The only wallet-level data points to a few large senders
The closest thing to an answer comes from a Bitquery investigation published October 19. Once it stripped out automated micro-payments, it found that ten sending wallets accounted for roughly 82% of RLUSD value in its XRPL dataset.
The dust it removed was extreme: about 7.79 million payments to three collector addresses carrying a combined 7,722 RLUSD, or roughly a tenth of a cent per transaction. Those bots inflate transaction counts enormously and dollar volume not at all, which is why payment counts are the wrong lens for this question. Bitquery’s window runs September 19 to October 18 and applies its own filters, so its percentages cannot be laid directly over Token Relations’ monthly total; nothing published since suggests the sender mix changed sharply in the last two weeks of October, but no one has shown that it didn’t either.
Ten dominant senders can mean two very different things. A payment processor, custodian or exchange can settle for thousands of end customers from a single address, in which case a concentrated sender list hides a broad user base. The reverse is also possible: one operator can run dozens of addresses and look like a crowd. Franklin Templeton’s XRPL fund position shows the same problem from the other side, with one wallet standing in for an unknown number of investors. Who controls Bitquery’s ten wallets, whether exchange hot wallets, Ripple-linked operations or third-party payment firms, is the fact missing from both October datasets.
What a real payment footprint would look like
Settling the question would take both networks measured over the same October window on the same terms: active sending addresses, the distribution of transfer sizes, the largest counterparties and how many sender-receiver pairs recur week after week. Issuer minting and redemptions, exchange inventory shuffles and identifiable bot traffic would each need to be set aside before the remainder could be called customer activity.
Even a clean dataset stops short of intent. A recurring Friday transfer looks the same whether it is payroll, a market maker rebalancing or a treasury sweep, and attributing it to a business purpose needs a disclosure from the party involved. Such disclosures exist so far only for capabilities, not volumes. Cross River said on October 15 that it had built RLUSD on XRPL into its core banking platform, giving business customers API access for payments and treasury moves, with availability initially limited to certain states. RLUSD’s trade-finance and custody arrangements sit in the same category. Neither has published a usage figure, so neither can be assigned any share of October’s $20.1 billion.
Why none of this is an XRP demand figure
A busy RLUSD ledger consumes XRP only through fees, and those are flat rather than proportional. Under XRPL’s transaction-cost rules, each transaction burns a minimum of 10 drops, or 0.00001 XRP, with the required cost rising when the network is under load. A $5 million RLUSD transfer and a $5 RLUSD transfer destroy the same fraction of a cent in XRP.
The one place RLUSD activity can create real XRP demand is conversion. XRPL’s cross-currency payments fill orders on the ledger’s built-in exchange, and a payment between two issued tokens can be routed through XRP when that path is cheaper than a direct one. If a meaningful share of October’s RLUSD left the ledger as local currency by that route, XRP was bought and sold along the way; if it moved RLUSD-to-RLUSD between wallets, it was not. The transfer total does not say which, and how a data provider counts the legs of a routed payment is one more reason monthly volume figures should come with their methodology attached.
October’s result is that a smaller RLUSD balance on XRPL did roughly twice the work per dollar of Ethereum’s larger one, and that most of the measured value came from a handful of senders. The next number worth waiting for is not a bigger monthly total. It is a sender breakdown from Token Relations, Bitquery or Ripple itself that says whether those ten wallets are ten institutions or ten thousand customers.
Kosta has reported on cryptocurrency markets and blockchain infrastructure since 2020, bringing over six years of hands-on experience in the crypto industry built through daily tracking of markets, trends, and emerging blockchain developments. Specializing in Bitcoin on-chain analysis, institutional ETF flows, and digital asset price action, his work at Coindoo has been cited by other news agencies and consistently covers market developments with a focus on data-driven reporting across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP. Over the years, Kosta has contributed to multiple crypto media outlets in different regions, authoring over 6,000 articles across the sector. His reporting spans cryptocurrency markets and the broader fintech industry, tracking not only price action but also the technological and regulatory forces shaping the ecosystem. To support his analysis, Kosta actively leverages on-chain data and metrics from leading platforms such as Santiment, Glassnode, and CryptoQuant, enabling deeper, evidence-based market insights. He believes in the power of transparency and the data that underpins the blockchain ecosystem. His academic background in Marketing Management from Denmark further complements his analytical approach, adding a strong understanding of communication strategy and content positioning to his work.
