Ripple has joined Africa’s leading payments giant Flutterwave’s Series E investment round at a striking $3.2 billion valuation. Notably, the primary asset used in this partnership is not XRP, but RLUSD – Ripple’s own dollar-pegged stablecoin. The collaboration spans 34 African nations, leveraging Flutterwave’s track record of managing over 1 billion transactions and a total payment volume surpassing $50 billion to date.
RLUSD emerges as the backbone for payments
The integration between Ripple and Flutterwave will operate through a unified API, seamlessly connecting Flutterwave’s payment gateways with the Ripple Payments network. This architecture aims to address two main challenges in cross-border transactions: eliminating costly currency conversions and reducing processing delays.
Flutterwave CEO Olugbenga Agboola has described the current banking system as stretched to its limits. He believes businesses now require programmable monetary solutions that can operate around the clock, and highlights ongoing testing of this model for both sellers and the company’s Send App.
Olugbenga Agboola explains that the potential of traditional banking infrastructure has largely been exhausted, and that companies now need programmable money systems running 24/7.
XRP Ledger: the network’s technical foundation
The new financial infrastructure clearly distinguishes roles: RLUSD, pegged to the US dollar, becomes the main settlement asset for cross-border payments, while the XRP Ledger acts as the technical backbone, facilitating swift transaction finality.
The details shared in the release underscore a preference among large corporations for price stability on big-ticket, billion dollar transactions. Stablecoins help businesses keep profit margins predictable by limiting currency volatility, while assets like XRP face a more cautious approach due to their fluctuating prices and regulatory uncertainties.
Mini glossary: RLUSD is a stablecoin developed by Ripple, pegged one-to-one with the US dollar. The XRP Ledger is the underlying blockchain platform providing the recordkeeping and consensus engine; the asset used for payments and the network infrastructure are not the same thing.
Mastercard collaboration shows a similar preference
The article points out that Ripple’s partnership strategy in the Mastercard Agent Pay project followed a similar playbook, utilizing the XRP Ledger for the backbone but choosing RLUSD as the default payment token to limit exposure to the volatility of open crypto markets.
Nevertheless, Ripple’s executives push back on suggestions that XRP is losing ground. CEO Brad Garlinghouse continues to describe XRP as the “North Star” of the ecosystem, stressing that the growing volume of XRP Ledger-based transactions is bolstering the network’s overall liquidity.
Regulation spotlight: the CLARITY Act
According to the report, Garlinghouse and Ripple’s chief legal officer Stuart Alderoty are lobbying vigorously in support of the CLARITY Act – legislation that would grant digital assets official legal status in the United States. This regulatory clarity could ease concerns for major partners like Mastercard and Flutterwave and pave the way for increased institutional investment in crypto.
