Ripple dumps XRP to pump RLUSD — still 0.2% the size of USDT

Ripple thinks its newly acquired prime brokerage, Hidden Road, will boost confidence in its tiny stablecoin, $RLUSD. The $1.2 billion cash, equity, and $XRP token deal is quadruple the value of $RLUSD’s market capitalization.

Unlike the $1-pegged $RLUSD, the value of $XRP is supposed to rally in response to positive developments.

Unfortunately, $XRP has declined in value today since CEO Brad Garlinghouse’s morning announcement of the company’s most expensive acquisition ever.

Price of $XRP since Brad Garlinghouse’s 8:06am NYC time zone tweet.

Read more: PayPal and Ripple stablecoins still sub-1% despite ‘stablecoin gold rush’

According to Garlinghouse, Hidden Road will use Ripple’s $RLUSD as collateral while prime brokering, “including cross-asset (crypto and traditional instrument) trades.”

Why Hidden Road couldn’t simply use another stablecoin to serve the same purpose wasn’t clear from the press release.

‘Efficient cross-margining’ despite many other marginable stablecoins

According to Ripple, $RLUSD is somehow “the first stablecoin to enable efficient cross-margining between the digital asset space and traditional markets,” despite many years of stablecoin-based margin across digital and traditional assets.

Indeed, a variety of stablecoins are eminently marginable and have denominated leveraged contracts for a variety of traditional assets for years.

CoinMarketCap found less than $50 million worth of volume traded on $RLUSD in the past 24 hours. CoinGecko found less than $7 million.

Both of those estimates compare to more than $80 billion for $RLUSD’s biggest competitor, USDT, over the same period.

$RLUSD’s market capitalization today is less than 0.04% of the stablecoin industry.