Key highlights:
- Ripple is supporting a new fund that will provide RLUSD loans to fintech and payments companies
- The company will invest as a limited partner and won't guarantee against losses
- The framework is backed by Cicada Partners and Clearpool
Ripple is stepping further into institutional lending, backing a new credit fund that will issue working-capital loans in its RLUSD stablecoin to fintech and payments companies through the XRP Ledger.
Together with @Ripple and @cicadacredit, Clearpool is building the flagship institutional credit platform on the XRP Ledger.
The credit layer we've spent years building is finally reaching a network built to move value at scale. Ready for our next chapter 💪🏻
Read more 👉🏻… https://t.co/5NEkOPG94s pic.twitter.com/yfWXgCPYCp— Clearpool (@ClearpoolFin) August 20, 2026
How the RLUSD credit fund would work
The fund will lend money in RLUSD to borrowers. Cicada Partners will be in charge of finding borrowers, setting the loan terms, and managing credit risk. The firm will also act as the fund's general partner and credit-pool manager.
Also, Clearpool, a lending platform, is building the technical infrastructure needed to create and run the credit pools. Ripple's role in the plan is to invest, coupled with other institutions. The company has not said how much it plans to commit, and the size of the fund hasn't been disclosed either.
Cicada said it has already underwritten more than $860 million in credit, while Clearpool confirmed it has facilitated over $930 million in institutional loans since 2021.
The company's participation comes as a limited partner under the same terms as other investors. This means it won't cover losses if borrowers default, leaving credit decisions and risk management to the structure Cicada has built.
Borrowers who qualify for the loans will get RLUSD and also repay their debt with the stablecoin. This would keep the stablecoin's function different from XRP. The altcoin will be used to cover transaction fees and the minimum balances required to hold an account on the ledger.
The lending fund adds to a list of things RLUSD is being used for. A June 30 report by Evernorth shared that the stablecoin had generated more than $2.5 billion in trading volume across XRP Ledger pairs since it launched. The RLUSD-XRP pair alone accounted for up to $900 million over six months.
The same report noted that RLUSD's share of onchain trading activity had grown from under 1% to around 12% during the year.
Source: Evernorth
Two missing pieces before it can launch
The product isn't ready to go live yet. Clearpool is currently testing the integration on a development network before it goes live on the XRP Ledger's live mainnet. This is because two features the system uses haven't been approved.
The first, known as XLS-65 or Single Asset Vaults, allows money from multiple lenders to be pooled together and managed under a defined set of rules. The second, XLS-66, is the lending protocol that is responsible for issuing, tracking, and repaying fixed-term loans on the ledger.
Both proposals have been under review by network validators for a while now. For this to proceed, they need to clear the ledger's formal amendment process, which requires a certain threshold of validator support.
Developers can only build and test the lending product on the development network rather than deploy it for real users for now.
The announcement also boosted XRP’s price as the token climbed about 20% in the past 24 hours and is up 30% in the past week.
