Ripple Clears EU Crypto License, RLUSD Fills Stablecoin Gap

Published by James Harris on July 6, 2026July 6, 2026

Ripple has secured a Crypto Asset Service Provider license from Luxembourg’s Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier, putting it one procedural step away from full MiCAR compliance and clearing it to offer crypto payment services across all 30 countries in the European Economic Area. Full approval typically follows the CASP license by about a month.

The timing is sharper than it looks. Revolut recently delisted Tether’s USDT for Euro Area users, creating a liquidity gap in the stablecoin market that Ripple’s native stablecoin RLUSD is positioned to partially fill. RLUSD supply grew from 1.2 billion tokens at the start of 2026 to a peak of 1.8 billion in early June before settling at 1.5 billion in July, suggesting real demand rather than just issuance. Ripple already holds an EU Electronic Money Institution license and a portfolio of 75 licenses globally, so the CASP authorization is less a new direction than a consolidation of existing infrastructure into a single passportable EU credential, the same commercial logic that has driven other firms through the MiCA process. Italian fintech Conio cleared a similar review under MiCA recently, and Stripe’s Bridge subsidiary secured both a CASP authorization and an EMI license in the same period, signaling that the post-transitional MiCA window is now competitive.

Ripple’s institutional positioning in Europe is real. Its XRP token is not participating in it.

XRP traded around $1.14 at the time of the announcement, with mindshare down over 11% according to Messari, and the asset recently hit its lowest oversold reading in 13 years. The XRPL network carries roughly $39 million in DeFi liquidity, a figure that underscores where Ripple’s actual business sits: licensed fintech infrastructure for traditional financial institutions, not on-chain activity. The preliminary CASP approval that preceded this came in June, so the market has had time to price the regulatory progress and largely looked elsewhere.

For institutional counterparties in Europe, the license removes the operational risk of service interruption that has affected less-prepared platforms during the MiCA transition period. Ripple’s managing director for UK and Europe stated the company is “licensed and ready to meet” demand from institutions building digital asset services alongside regulated partners, which is the specific client segment that has been waiting on compliance certainty before committing. Whether RLUSD can convert that positioning into meaningful stablecoin market share in a post-USDT European market is the more consequential question for the next six months.