This is what has been minted in Ripple USD (RLUSD) ahead of today’s launch

Ripple, the US-based enterprise company behind the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, made headlines on December 16, announcing that its long-awaited stablecoin is finally ready to roll out, which will happen later today.

There was a lot of speculation and fraud attempts before the official statement, but CryptoQuant data shows that the actual number of new tokens minted has increased to almost $66 million.

Interestingly, the majority of RLUSD coins are on the Ethereum network: $52.9 million, while only $13.3 million have been minted on Ripple’s own network, XRPL.

The numbers are quite impressive, given that the stablecoin has not yet officially seen the light of day. This is scheduled to take place later today, as reported yesterday.

After receiving the necessary green light from NYDFS, the Ripple team announced on December 16 that RLUSD would be available the following day. Additionally, the stablecoin advisory board has seen a couple of new additions: Raghuram Rajan (former governor of the RBI) and Kenneth Montgomery (former first vice president and chief operating officer of the Boston Federal Reserve).

Ripple described RLUSD as the “future of finance.” It is a stablecoin fully backed by US dollar deposits, government bonds, and “other cash equivalents with monthly third-party audits.” It will receive multi-chain support, which is already evident in the minting process on Ethereum and XRPL, with other networks coming later.

RLUSD is designed for “cross-border payments, DeFi integration, and bridging fiat and crypto currency.”

Ripple aims to enter a growing and highly competitive stablecoin market. The total value of all these tokens has recently skyrocketed above $200 billion and is primarily dominated by Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC.