BNY Mellon’s 24/7 Treasury Plan Dwarfs Ripple’s RLUSD Role

BNY Mellon told clients this week it wants US Treasuries trading and settling around the clock by 2027, and it already ran an after-hours Treasury trade with stablecoin issuers to prove the idea works. The bank did not say which stablecoin.

Ripple made sure everyone assumed it was RLUSD. Within hours of the letter surfacing, a Ripple executive was on social media taking a bow. But the actual document Bloomberg described never names Ripple, and RLUSD remains a rounding error next to the stablecoins BNY has custodied for years.

A 2027 Deadline for Round-the-Clock Treasuries

The letter, sent to clients on Wednesday, lays out a specific timeline. BNY plans to introduce tokenized Treasuries and run pilot trades on its private blockchain before the end of 2026. Full always-on settlement of both conventional and tokenized Treasuries is the target for 2027.

That matters because the Treasury market, the deepest and most liquid debt market on earth, still runs on settlement cycles built for a slower era. Trades typically clear on a T+1 or T+2 basis, meaning counterparties carry exposure and capital sits idle for a day or two after every transaction.

Here is how BNY has described its own timeline getting to that point.

1. Earlier in 2026: BNY facilitated an after-hours Treasury transaction involving stablecoin issuers, its first public proof that the concept works outside normal market hours.
2. By the end of 2026: The bank plans to launch tokenized US Treasuries and begin pilot trades on its private blockchain.
3. In 2027: BNY aims to fully support always-on settlement for both conventional and tokenized Treasuries.

Nowhere in that sequence does BNY name a specific stablecoin partner. The word used, repeatedly, is plural: issuers.

Where Ripple’s Name Actually Appears

Jack McDonald, Ripple’s senior vice president of stablecoins, did not wait for anyone to ask what RLUSD’s role was. He posted on X almost immediately.

Congratulations to BNY on this milestone. Excited to be partnering together as $RLUSD helps support the evolution toward always-on Treasury markets and institutional digital asset infrastructure.

That is the entire public link between this specific announcement and Ripple USD. The underlying custody relationship is real. BNY became the primary reserve custodian for RLUSD on July 9, 2025, holding the cash and short-term Treasuries backing the token and providing transaction banking to support it. RLUSD itself is issued through Standard Custody and Trust Company, a Ripple subsidiary, under a New York Department of Financial Services trust charter.

That custody deal is real and it is old news by crypto standards, a year old this month. What is new is a client letter about market infrastructure that happens to mention stablecoin issuers in passing, and Ripple turning that mention into a headline.

How Big Is RLUSD Next to USDT and USDC?

RLUSD’s combined supply across Ethereum and the XRP Ledger sits close to $1.6 billion, based on categorized market data. That is real growth for a token that launched in December 2024. It is also a fraction of what the two largest stablecoins carry.

Tether’s USDT holds roughly $184 billion in market cap, and Circle’s USDC sits near $73 billion, together accounting for the overwhelming majority of a stablecoin market now worth about $303 billion. RLUSD’s share of that total works out to roughly half a percent.

RLUSD is not without real institutional traction. BlackRock uses it as a redemption mechanism for its BUIDL tokenized fund, Deutsche Bank has integrated Ripple’s payment infrastructure, and LMAX Group uses RLUSD as collateral across spot crypto and derivatives trading. That does not change the size gap sitting next to USDT and USDC.

BNY Mellon Bets on Staying Neutral

The more useful way to read this week’s letter is as a data point in a longer pattern. BNY has spent four years building a client list of stablecoin issuers, not picking a favorite among them.

• USD Coin (USDC) – Circle’s stablecoin, in BNY custody since April 2022, the bank’s first stablecoin mandate.
• Société Générale’s CoinVertible – a euro-denominated institutional stablecoin, added to BNY’s roster in June 2025.
• Ripple USD (RLUSD) – Ripple’s enterprise stablecoin, moved into BNY custody in July 2025.

BNY’s own leadership has said plainly it has no interest in issuing a stablecoin itself. Instead, the bank has focused on tokenized deposits, on-chain representations of client balances, as its blockchain payments strategy. BNY’s tokenized deposit launch pulled in a wide roster of partners, including Anchorage Digital, Paxos, Galaxy, Ripple Prime, Securitize, Talos and Zerohash.

That is not a company betting on one horse. It is a custodian building rails wide enough for whichever horse wins, and collecting a toll either way.

The Weekend Gap Costing Wall Street

The mechanical reason any of this matters has little to do with any single token. Treasuries currently stop trading and settling on evenings, weekends and holidays, the same gap that has existed for decades in a market now worth close to $28 trillion in outstanding debt.

That gap ties up collateral and creates counterparty risk every time a trade cannot settle instantly. Closing it is the actual prize, and banks are racing toward it from several directions at once. JPMorgan filed plans for a $100 million tokenized fund built for stablecoin issuers to park reserves in Treasury bills and repo on Ethereum. State Street rolled out a government money market fund aligned with the GENIUS Act, the federal framework that set rules for payment stablecoins.

Tokenized Treasuries themselves have gone from under $1 billion in early 2024 to about $14.6 billion by mid-2026, still a sliver of the broader Treasury market but growing fast enough that banks are no longer treating it as an experiment. Citi’s own research arm projects the wider tokenized asset market, not just Treasuries, could reach $4 trillion to $5 trillion in value by 2030. McKinsey’s estimate, excluding stablecoins entirely, lands closer to $2 trillion over the same stretch.

What 2027 Actually Demands

Getting from a single after-hours pilot trade to genuine always-on settlement requires more than one bank’s letter. It needs primary dealers, clearing utilities and regulators all moving on the same clock, and none of that happens on Ripple’s timeline or BNY’s alone.

Ripple’s heavy emphasis on charters, custody and compliance language is not incidental. The company spent years fighting the Securities and Exchange Commission in a case that, according to reporting on the lawsuit that nearly ended the company, left lasting scars on how it approaches every new institutional deal. RLUSD’s design around a New York trust charter reads like a company that never wants to relive that fight.

Wall Street analysts are not united on what deeper bank-stablecoin ties mean for incumbents. When BNY expanded USDC access for institutional clients earlier this year, KeyBanc Capital Markets analysts flagged it as a competitive threat to Circle’s supply growth, while William Blair analysts told investors the competitive fears were largely “overblown,” arguing new entrants would struggle to replicate Circle’s existing model.

The same tension applies here. A neutral settlement layer helps every stablecoin that qualifies for it, which is exactly why RLUSD’s mention this week says more about Ripple’s marketing reflex than about any exclusive arrangement. BNY’s pilot runs through 2026 regardless of which issuer gets credit for it, and the 2027 target does not move based on who tweets fastest.