Ripple is backing a new institutional credit fund that will lend its RLUSD stablecoin to fintech and payments companies on the XRP Ledger, alongside lending platform Clearpool and credit manager Cicada Partners.
The fund will provide working-capital loans denominated in RLUSD, per a release shared with CoinDesk, with Cicada sourcing borrowers, setting loan terms and monitoring credit risk. Clearpool is building the infrastructure used to create and manage the lending pools, while Ripple provides capital as an investor alongside other institutions.
Neither the size of the fund nor Ripple's commitment was disclosed.
None of it is live on the XRP Ledger's main network yet, however. Clearpool is testing the integration on a development network, and the two ledger features underpinning the product, a lending protocol known as XLS-66 and single asset vaults under XLS-65, are still going through the network's amendment voting process, as CoinDesk earlier reported.
Those two do the work the fund needs. The lending protocol handles issuing and repaying loans directly on the ledger. The vault system pools money from several lenders under a manager who decides where it goes, which in this case is Cicada.
The firm says it has underwritten more than $860 million of credit and will act as both fund general partner and credit-pool manager. Clearpool says it has facilitated more than $930 million of institutional loans since 2021.
Ripple participates as a limited partner on the same terms as other investors rather than guaranteeing losses.
Borrowers receive RLUSD and repay in it, which creates demand for Ripple's dollar-pegged token while moving lending activity onto XRPL. XRP is not what gets lent, however, as it solely covers transaction fees and the minimum balances the ledger requires accounts to hold.
The plans come as XRP rose almost 20% in the past 24 hours to $1.30 and is up 30% over seven days, part of a broad rally that has lifted every major token since the Treasury doubled its bond buybacks on Wednesday.