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Ripple to Roll Out RLUSD Stablecoin on Dec. 17, Adds Former Central Bankers to Advisory Board

The stablecoin will become broadly available to crypto users on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum networks beginning on Tuesday.

Ripple, an enterprise-focused blockchain service closely related to the XRP Ledger (XRP), said it will start making its highly-anticipated U.S. dollar stablecoin accessible to users on Tuesday, Dec. 17 following the token’s regulatory approval.

RLUSD will be initially listed on several exchanges and crypto platforms including Uphold, MoonPay, Archax and CoinMENA, the company said in a press release, with further listings on Bitso, Bullish, Bitstamp, Mercado Bitcoin and Independent Reserve, Zero Hash and others in the coming weeks.

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The company also announced two additions to its stablecoin advisory board: Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and Kenneth Montgomery, former first vice president and COO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. The pair join board members announced in October including Sheila Bair, former chair of FDIC, and Chris Larsen, co-founder and executive chairman and co-founder of Ripple.

The launch follows Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse’s announcement last week that RLUSD sealed “final approval” from the New York Department of Financial Services, paving the way for rolling out the stablecoin for the public from its test phase. RLUSD is fully backed by U.S. dollar deposits, U.S. government bonds and cash equivalents and aims to keep a steady price at $1.

With RLUSD, Ripple aims to compete for a piece in the rapidly growing stablecoin market, currently dominated by Tether’s $140 billion USDT and Circle’s $40 billion USDC tokens. Stablecoins are a key piece of infrastructure bridging digital asset markets and traditional finance, serving as liquidity for trading, vehicle for blockchain-based transactions and increasingly as a payment method across borders. Traditional financial institutions such as banks and payment companies including PayPal, Visa and Societe Generale have also entered the stablecoin space as regulators around the world put rules and guidelines in place for the asset class, bringing much-desired regulatory clarity.

“Early on, Ripple made a deliberate choice to launch our stablecoin under the NYDFS limited purpose trust company charter, widely regarded as the premier regulatory standard worldwide,” Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said in a statement. “As the U.S. moves toward clearer regulations, we expect to see greater adoption of stablecoins like RLUSD, which offer real utility and are backed by years of trust and expertise in the industry.”

RLUSD will be initially available in the Americas, Asia-Pacific, UK and Middle East regions via its distribution and exchange partners, Jack McDonald, senior vice president of stablecoin at Ripple, said in an interview with CoinDesk. He was CEO of Standard Custody & Trust, a company acquired by Ripple earlier this year that holds a New York Trust license.

The token won’t be accessible in the E.U. in the beginning as Ripple does not hold the necessary license under the bloc’s MiCAR regulations, but the company is “actively exploring” ways to enter the bloc’s market, he added.

RLUSD volatility warning

RLUSD, which aims to hold a $1 price, may see an unusual price volatility due to early demand from traders and limited supply.

“There may be supply shortages in the very early days before the market stabilizes,” David Schwartz, chief technology officer at Ripple, warned in an X post. He said that some traders “are willing to pay” as much as $1,200 token price to buy a fraction of RLUSD.

“Please don’t FOMO into a stablecoin,” he added. “This is not an opportunity to get rich.”

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MicroStrategy’s Addition to Nasdaq-100 May Pave Way for S&P 500 Inclusion: Benchmark

The software company’s potential addition to the S&P 500 index could be an even larger opportunity in the medium-term, the report said.

MicroStrategy’s (MSTR) addition to the Nasdaq-100 index is a big deal, but its potential inclusion in the U.S’s S&P 500 index could be an even bigger opportunity in the medium-term, broker Benchmark said in a report Monday.

The index provider announced on Friday that MicroStrategy would be added to the Nasdaq-100 on December 23.

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The company founded by Michael Saylor easily meets S&P 500 inclusion criteria in terms of market cap and trading volume, but currently does not meet two other requirements, the report said.

The company needs to report positive earnings for the most recent quarter and “total positive earnings for the sum of its trailing four consecutive quarters,” analyst Mark Palmer wrote.

Still, MicroStrategy has said that it plans to adopt new Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) guidance for the accounting treatment of bitcoin held on its balance sheet in the first quarter 2025, Benchmark said, and this “would position it to immediately begin reporting positive earnings.”

MicroStrategy became the first bitcoin company to enter the Nasdaq-100, and will be the 40th largest firm in the index, with a 0.47% weighting, broker Bernstein said in a report on Monday.

How big is the impact?

MicroStrategy entering the Nasdaq-100 is a big milestone for the stock as the fifth largest ETF by assets under management (AUM), the Invesco QQQ Trust Series ETF, will add to the company to its index along with many others.

According to VettaFi data, the three largest ETFs by AUM are all comprised of the S&P 500. These are the SPDR S&P 500 (SPY), Vanguard S&P 500 (VOO) and iShares Core S&P 500 (IVV). Collectively these three ETFs hold over $1.8 trillion in AUM.

The enormous impact of entering the S&P 500 could be seen with Tesla (TSLA) which saw its stock surge following its inclusion in the index on Dec. 21 2020. The stock doubled in the space of a year from $200 to $400 a share. The lion’s share of the gains came before inclusion to the S&P 500, which saw the stock run up 10-fold from December 2019. This could suggest a large portion of MicroStrategy gains could come before it joins the benchmark index.

Kraken’s Ink Layer-2 Goes Live

The team had originally planned for Ink to go live in early 2025, so the launch of the main network is ahead of schedule.

Kraken, the seventh-largest crypto exchange, said its layer-2 rollup network, built on top of the Ethereum blockchain, has gone live.

The network, called Ink, is based on the OP stack, a customizable framework that lets developers build their own rollups using Optimism’s technology. The team had originally planned for Ink to go live in early 2025, so the launch of its main network is ahead of schedule.

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We’re excited to announce Ink is live on mainnet!

Months ahead of schedule, we’re officially launching as part of the Optimism Superchain. This is just the beginning of our journey to bridge the gap between users and builders in DeFi.

Let’s ink the future together ✍️ pic.twitter.com/WmOKNiMO06

— ink (@inkonchain) December 18, 2024

Kraken agreed to receive 25 million OP tokens (worth about $58 million) as part of a deal to build on the OP Stack. Optimism has acknowledged that handing out developer grants for participants building on the stack is part of its strategy, which in turn contributes back to the wider “Superchain” ecosystem.

Kraken competitor Coinbase said in August 2023 that it would build a layer-2 network with OP Stack. The product, called Base, is now the second-largest rollup network according to L2beat. At the time, Optimism said the Base team would receive up to 118 million OP tokens and, in return, would contribute the higher of 2.5% of its sequencer revenue or 15% of its profits to the Optimism Collective.

Other participants building a layer 2 with the OP Stack — including Uniswap, World Network, and Sony Blockchain Labs — have not said how many OP tokens they expect to receive as part of their deals.

“Today is just the beginning for Ink, and now our boldest work really begins – growing Ink,” said Andrew Koller, the founder of Ink, in a press release. “We’re pushing the boundaries of on-chain experiences to unlock new applications and opportunities for builders and users alike, layering privacy, security and UX enhancements on a foundation of deep liquidity.”

Trump-Backed World Liberty Financial Swaps Its cbBTC for WBTC After Sun Joins as Adviser

The swap took place Wednesday, the same day BiT Global lost a court case seeking to prevent Coinbase delisting WBTC.

World Liberty Financial, backed by the family of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump, on Wednesday exchanged about $10 million worth of Coinbase’s (COIN) wrapped bitcoin, cbBTC, for rival WBTC.

Wrapped bitcoin is a form of the world’s largest cryptocurrency that can be used in decentralized finance (DeFi) on blockchains other than Bitcoin.

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Coinbase introduced cbBTC in September, and in November said it would delist WBTC, citing its listing standards. That action prompted BiT Global, a custodian involved in WBTC, to sue the crypto exchange to prevent the removal. A court ruled against BiT Global on Wednesday.

There’s one more link in the chain: Justin Sun, the founder of the Tron blockchain and one of CoinDesk’s Most Influential 2024. In its defense, Coinbase cited BiT Global’s links to Sun, who has been accused of fraud and market manipulation in the U.S., as an “unacceptable risk.” Sun, who denies the accusations, also became an adviser to World Liberty Financial, a position he gained after picking up a $30 million stake in the platform last month in exchange for WLFI tokens.

https://twitter.com/lookonchain/status/1869542379163934925

World Liberty Finance has not explicitly stated its decision to swap the tokens. On-chain data shows it has been active in the market in the past week, picking up millions of dollars worth of Aave (AAVE), Chainlink’s LINK and Ethena’s ENA tokens, all companies related to it through partnerships or integrations.

Sun has little to do with WBTC directly. In August, BitGo, the original and longtime custodian of the bitcoin backing WBTC, said it would distribute control over the project’s custody to three entities globally (including BiT Global) instead of just one to help decentralize the operation.

BiT Global is registered as a Trust and Company Service Provider (TCSP) in Hong Kong and is a “strategic partnership between BitGo, Justin Sun, and the Tron ecosystem,” according to the August release.

Sun has no direct or indirect involvement on the cap table of those companies or the listed shareholders of BiT Global, board member Robert Liu said in an October interview

Some board members believe Sun’s involvement is actually “good for WBTC,” he said, given the success of Tron, crypto exchange HTX and other businesses.

“The Tron blockchain has more than 50% of global market share,” Liu said. “They have the highest turnover rate. So people have no issue putting more than $60 billion of the stablecoin assets circulating on Tron blockchain.”

Binance Partners With Circle to Push USDC Stablecoin Adoption Across the Globe

The partnership will bring more USDC trading pairs, special promotions on USDC across trading and other products, Binance CEO Richard Teng said.

Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, has formed a strategic partnership with stablecoin giant Circle to accelerate global adoption of the USDC stablecoin, the companies said on Wednesday at Abu Dhabi Finance Week.

Through the partnership, Circle’s USDC will be more extensively available to over 240 million customers for trading, savings and payments. Binance will also adopt the second-largest stablecoin as “a vital dollar stablecoin” for its own corporate treasury, according to a press release.

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“Through our strategic partnership, our users will have even more opportunities to use USDC on our platform, including more USDC trading pairs, special promotions on USDC across trading, and other products on Binance,” Binance CEO Richard Teng said in a statement.

Staunch competition for growth exists between Circle, which has $40 billion worth of USDC in circulation, and its bigger rival Tether, whose USDT stablecoin has a market capitalization of about $140 billion.

Circle has typically cast itself as the more regulated stablecoin, so the high-profile tie-up suggests Binance is charting a path that complies with global regulation. Binance settled U.S. allegations last year by paying more than $4 billion.

Asked if this was a conscious choice to be more compliant with regulations, a Binance spokesperson said via email: “Our users want choices. We always work with multiple stablecoins. Today we support USDT, USDC, FDUSD, and a bunch of others. And we will continue to work with multiple stablecoin issuers or creators.”

As well as a tool for simply buying and selling other cryptocurrencies, U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins can be used to hedge inflation in developing countries or facilitate lower-cost and efficient remittances, a Binance spokesperson said. Each USDC and USDT token is worth close to $1.

“With Binance rapidly becoming the world’s leading financial super app, and stablecoin adoption and utility at the core of this future financial system, this is a tremendous opportunity for USDC as it becomes ubiquitous on the Binance platform,” Jeremy Allaire, chairman and CEO of Circle, said in a statement.

Also in the UAE this week, Circle established an Abu Dhabi partnership with LuLu Financial Holdings to facilitate remittances and cross-border payments with USDC.

Tether has also been at large in the region, with news that USDT is now an “Accepted Virtual Asset,” with the blessing of regulators in Abu Dhabi Global Market.

Solana Was the Biggest Draw for New Crypto Developers in 2024: Electric Capital

Ethereum remained the blockchain with the most devs, and the overall population of software builders in crypto was flat, the VC firm said in its annual survey.

The ranks of cryptocurrency developers held steady in 2024, as some recent entrants left the industry while veterans mostly stuck around, according to a report released Thursday by Electric Capital.

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The total developers working in crypto worldwide was basically flat, declining a statistically insignificant 7% from a year earlier, and the number of monthly active developers went to 23,613 in November, the report said.

Meanwhile, the Solana ecosystem, ground zero for the memecoin craze, was the most popular blockchain among new developers, an 83% increase in its ecosystem compared to a year earlier. In July, this community became the first since 2016 to bring on board more devs than Ethereum. Solana attracted 7,625 new developers in 2024, the most of any chain and a little over 1,000 more than Ethereum.

The results underscore the challenge Ethereum faces as rival smart contract platform Solana’s low fees and fast transactions attract investment and talent.

According to Maria Shen, a general partner at Electric Capital, the share of developers who have worked in crypto for more than two years grew in 2024. Among those who left the industry, the largest group were relative newcomers.

“These are people who effectively joined during the bear market, and haven’t really seen anything since then,” Shen told CoinDesk in an interview.

The stability of the developer population is an auspicious sign, Shen said.

“When we look at the sector of established developers, it’s growing and looking very healthy,” she said. “When we look at full-time developers .. this had the least amount of declines, very small, like [a] 4% decline year over year. So overall, I would say, [the population is] looking very healthy, but it’s flat, and mainly because of the losses from people who joined less than a year ago and then less than two years ago.”

Solana has momentum, Ethereum remains dominant

Despite Solana’s momentum and massive increase in new developer talent, its main competitor, Ethereum, is still ahead.

“Ethereum absolutely dominates,” said Shen “Ethereum has very, very deep network effects, and you can see that through the data.”

The number of monthly Ethereum developers shrank by 17% over the last year, to 6,244, but Shen said this blockchain still has the biggest developer ecosystem by far.

“Ethereum dominates by overall developers everywhere, in every continent of the world. But Solana is currently number two,” Shen said.

Growth in Ethereum development can mainly be attributed to the vast number of layer-2 networks that have popped up, with Base, Optimism, and Arbitrum seeing many developers working on their chains. Slightly more than half – 56% – of Ethereum developers are working on the layer-2s on top of it, Electric Capital found.

Furthermore, Eigenlayer, the main restaking protocol on Ethereum, brought in a period of massive developer innovation for its ecosystem as protocols deployed their Actively Validated Services (AVS) in the ecosystem. Eigenlayer was the fastest growing developer ecosystem in 2024, with a 167% increase by monthly overall developers, the report said.

Developers are global

Electric Capital’s report also showed that crypto is becoming more global, as Asia became the continent with the biggest number of blockchain developers, and North America dropped from first place to third. However, the U.S. remains the number one country for now for developers, with a 19% share.

India, however, brought on board more new crypto developers in 2024 than any other country, with 17% of the new developer share.

“Anecdotally, there’s a lot of education programs and developer education programs, there’s a lot of hackathons in India,” Shen said.

The geographic diversification of developers is another salubrious trend, Shen said.

“The idea that the U.S. and North America continues its dominance is not only unlikely, but I would say, kind of undesirable,” she said. “You do want to see more global diversity in crypto, and to be borderless, and I think there’s a lot of great engineering talent outside of the U.S.”

IMF Urges El Salvador Again to Strengthen Regulatory Framework and Oversight of Bitcoin

The IMF has been asking El Salvador for changes regarding its bitcoin law since its adoption in 2021.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recommended on Tuesday that El Salvador narrow the scope of the bitcoin law and strengthen the regulatory framework and oversight of the bitcoin ecosystem.

During a press conference, IMF spokesperson Julie Kozack also said that the IMF recommended El Salvador limiting public sector exposure to bitcoin, Reuters reported.

This isn’t the first time IMF has warned El Salvador. Most recently, in August, the IMF said something similar when it declared in a statement that “while many of the risks have not yet materialized, there is joint recognition that further efforts are needed to enhance transparency and mitigate potential fiscal and financial stability risks from the Bitcoin project.” At that time, the IMF also said that “additional discussions in this and other key areas remain necessary.”

In fact, the back-and-forth history between El Salvador and the IMF over bitcoin goes back years. In November 2021, the IMF said that bitcoin should not be used as legal tender in El Salvador and urged the Central American country to strengthen the regulation and supervision of that ecosystem, something it called for again in January 2022.

El Salvador established bitcoin as legal tender in September 2021, being the first country to do so globally. Currently, it holds 5892 BTC, equivalent to about $345 million at today’s price.

Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, recently said his plan to make the country a hotbed for the largest and oldest cryptocurrency has been “net positive” but adoption has fallen short of his expectations.

In Thursday’s presentation, the IMF positively highlighted Bukele’s budget for 2025, which expects the country to be debt-free.

Tokenization Allows More Efficient Collateral Transfers, Digital Asset, Euroclear and World Gold Council Found in Pilot Project

The initiative created digital versions of gilts, eurobonds and gold on the Canton Network to test complex financial transactions on blockchain rails.

Real-world asset tokenization company Digital Asset said Tuesday that it completed a pilot initiative to tokenize U.K. bonds (gilts), Eurobonds, and gold for financial transactions using the Canton Network protocol.

Major securities settlement provider Euroclear, the World Gold Council and global law firm Clifford Chance also participated in the process, alongside with other banks, investors, custodians and a central securities depository, the press release said.

Tokenization refers to the process of converting real-world assets (RWA) such as bonds, real estate, or commodities like gold into digital tokens on blockchain rails. These tokens represent ownership or control over the asset, allowing it to be traded more easily and quickly in a digital format, while still preserving the value of the underlying property. Reports by Boston Consulting Group and 21Shares forecast over $10 trillion of tokenized assets by the end of the decade in their optimistic scenarios, while McKinsey predicted $2 trillion by then in its base case.

In the case of this pilot, which ran between June and July, the project created digital representations of gilts, Eurobonds, and gold to be used as collateral with greater transparency, faster transfers and around-the-clock, near-instantaneous settlements between parties, without the delays associated with traditional financial rails.

“Our work with the pilot participants has demonstrated that tokenized assets can be used with immediate effect to meet intraday margin calls outside of normal settlement cycles, processing times, and time zones,” said Kelly Mathieson, chief business development officer at Digital Asset. It also demonstrated how the ledger can serve as the legal record and has validated the secured party’s control over the digital twin and real-world assets received as margin or collateral in the event of a counterparty default.”

Tokenized gold also offered notable benefits, said Mike Oswin, global head of market structure and innovation at the World Gold Council. By converting physical gold into “Standard Gold Units” (SGU), the pilot demonstrated how the precious metal can be used more seamlessly as collateral asset in financial transactions.

“This removes traditional barriers like storage limitations,” said Mike Oswin, global head of market structure and innovation at The World Gold Council.

U.S. Crypto Industry Will Follow a Different Path From Rest of World: BitMEX Group CEO

BitMex does not operate in the U.S. and is positioned more in Asia than any other part of the world.

SINGAPORE —The U.S. crypto market will take a different path from the rest of the world, consolidating more with traditional finance (TradFi), because of differences in the regulatory environment and customer needs, Stephan Lutz, CEO of crypto exchange BitMEX, said in an interview at Token2049 in Singapore.

“I think that the U.S. crypto businesses will pivot in one direction that is consolidating TradFi with crypto,” Lutz said. “If you look at Coinbase, if you look at Circle, you look at Kraken, they are basically going more and more into becoming a digital twin of the TradFi system.”

The split, Lutz called it a bifurcation, means U.S. crypto businesses will focus on domestic customers, and companies from the rest of the world will stay out of the country. BitMEX itself does not operate there, having pleaded guilty in July to violating the Bank Secrecy Act and failing to set up an adequate know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) program between 2015 and 2020. In 2022, co-founders Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo and Samuel Reed were fined a total of $30 million for violating money-laundering rules.

Instead, BitMEX is more prominently placed in Asia, said Lutz, who was previously a partner at PwC after spending time at Deutsche Boerse, the operator of Germany’s largest stock exchange.

The industry has been “begging for issue-specific legislation in the U.S. for years,” he said, though he’s not optimistic of the chances for crypto legislation moving through the Senate before November’s presidential election.

“Market institutions in Asia will take advantage of America’s confusion.”

Asia and India

Unlike the U.S. and European Union where almost everyone has access to the conventional banking system, Asia has the banked – family offices, accredited investors and wealthy corporates – alongside the so-called unbanked, who comprise more than half of the continent.

It’s that group that needs alternative services such as international remittances from family members working abroad to support relatives at home, a real use case.

“This is why you have a bifurcation of the markets. You serve completely different needs,” Lutz said.

According to Lutz, outside of the U.S., India will power the crypto industry in the next 10 years provided the companies are reasonably open and if policymakers understand that crypto “actually adds to their capability of maintaining” monetary policy independence.

Former Government Employees, Compliance Officers Rally for Detained Binance Executive

Tigran Gambaryan has been detained in Nigeria since February.

A group of former government employees and compliance officials, now working in the crypto industry, rallied in front of the United Nations on Wednesday to show support for Tigran Gambaryan, Binance’s head of financial crime compliance who’s been detained in Nigeria since February.

Gambaryan is being held as a representative of the company he works for, with prosecutors trying him on money laundering charges brought against Binance. He is being held in the Kuje Prison, which is notorious for holding terrorists and other criminals, where his health has deteriorated heavily; in a recent video, he was struggling to walk with a crutch. A spokesperson for his family said he has also suffered multiple infections, as well as a herniated disc in his back.

Despite this, the U.S. government only publicly acknowledged his detention earlier this month, though Secretary of State Antony Blinken has discussed Gambaryan with Nigerian officials in May, the New York Times reported.

Amanda Wick, a former federal prosecutor and government investigator who organized the protest, noted that Gambaryan used to work for the U.S. government.

Prior to his role at Binance, Gambaryan was an investigator with the IRS’s Criminal Investigation wing.

“America has fought harder for people who committed crimes [in the countries they were detained in] than for someone who fought for his country,” Wick said.

Nigeria prosecuting someone to get the attention of their employer is “truly unjust,” said Chris Tyrrell, the chief risk and compliance officer at Ondo Finance.

Gary Weinstein, the founder of Infinity Advisory LLC and former state assistant attorney general, said all of the attendees present were in favor of consumer protections and “high-integrity” markets, including Gambaryan. He noted that Gambaryan had been invited by the Nigerian government when he visited in February and was given a “false assurance of safe passage.”

“One cannot do their job if one is in fear of getting snatched by a nation-state,” he said.