Half a million dollars' worth of Ripple USD just got erased in public, and it did not come from a hacker, a whale dump, or some exchange drama — it came from the token's own treasury.
On Dec. 19, an on-chain transaction that Ripple Stablecoin Tracker highlighted shows 500,000 RLUSD sent to the Ethereum "null" address (0x000) with a successful status on Etherscan. This is a classic burn pattern, which removes tokens from circulation rather than relocating them to another wallet.
The number is not huge next to RLUSD's current scale, but it is big enough to be noticeable. With a circulating supply of around 1.33B RLUSD and a market cap near $1.33 billion, a 500,000-unit burn is an intentional and auditable supply cut that stands out because it is not just some market noise.
Ripple USD stablecoin today
The timing is also interesting because RLUSD is already trading with real activity for a young stablecoin. The CoinMarketCap dashboard shows about $107.37 million in 24-hour volume, around 6,760 on-chain holders and a #8 slot among stablecoins by market cap.
For comparison, the total valuation of the stablecoin segment right now amounts to $317.48 billion.
Interestingly, this burn happened right after Ripple pushed RLUSD beyond its current rails as the San Francisco company has teamed up with Wormhole to bring the stablecoin to Optimism, Base and Unichain using Wormhole's NTT standard. They are calling it the first wave of layer-2 expansion, with a bigger rollout to come once approvals are in place.
