Ripple’s participation in national digital currency (CBDC) pilots has helped the company better understand the needs of central banks and the role of commercial players in the future financial system. This was stated by Ripple’s former CBDC advisor Anthony Welfer.
Ripple has been involved in testing digital currencies with a number of nations since 2021. Palau, Montenegro, Bhutan, Georgia and the UK were among the partners. According to Welfer, these projects not only allowed the technology to be tested in practice, but also spurred the development of the XRP Ledger (XRPL).
“The CBDC experiments showed that the main challenge of the future is interoperability. CBDC, stablecoins, tokenised deposits need to work together to make it easy and convenient for people and businesses to use them,” he stressed.
Ripple has started to pay more attention to the stackablecoin market as well. Back in 2023, the company introduced an XRPL-based platform for issuing both CBDCs and stablecoins. In August 2025, it launched its own token, RLUSD, pegged to the US dollar. The coin runs on both the XRPL network and the Ethereum network. RLUSD’s capitalisation is already close to $790 million, which remains a small share of the global stablecoin market (over $300 billion).
In parallel, Ripple announced a partnership with DBS and Franklin Templeton to launch trade and credit tokenisation products based on XRPL and RLUSD.
Thus, the company is trying to integrate into the rapidly growing sector of digital assets, using the experience gained in pilots with states.