We’re only halfway through the year, but Ripple’s stablecoin, RLUSD, has made a serious entrance into the ranks of industry leaders.

While some of the company’s plans may have seemed speculative, its steps into the TradFi space are steadily being solidified.

Decisively Climbing The Ranks

RLUSD quickly made waves by being designed to be Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) compliant, the European Union’s regulatory framework for digital assets, as it processed over 33,000 transactions within its first 6-month test phase before being released.

The majority of the coins ($52.9M) were available on Ethereum, and the rest were minted on the XRP Ledger (XRPL) – $13.3 million. After being approved by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), the stablecoin was then officially launched late last December.

Initially available on MoonPay, Uphold Inc., CoinMena, and several other platforms, it’s now available on more well-known exchanges such as Kraken, Bitget, and Uniswap, to name a few.

By the end of Q1 of 2025, it had already amassed a market cap of over $244 million across both XRPL and Ethereum.

Further achievements did not lag far behind, as the product, pegged 1:1 to the dollar, was recognized by the Dubai Financial Services Authority (DFSA) as a crypto token within the Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC), and by that time, the market cap was around $310 million.

Some of the latest news features the stablecoin being the first to be supported by a Swiss global bank, AMINA, which offers trading and custody services, along with the announcement that XRP is seeking a US banking license.

Earlier today, the company announced that it has chosen BNY Mellon to serve as the stablecoin’s custodian.

At the time of printing, the market cap of RLUSD stands at just above $500 million, according to data from CoinMarketCap. Although this is a significant milestone for a stablecoin that has been in existence for just over half a year, it still has a way to go to reach the heavy hitters, USDT by Tether and USDC by Circle, which boast capitalizations of $158 billion and $61 billion, respectively.

A Successful And “Failed” Acquisition by Ripple

Apart from the notable accomplishments in the stablecoin rankings, the company behind RLUSD has also made a significant purchase this year.

In April, Ripple acquired the brokerage firm Hidden Road in a $1.25 billion deal, marking one of the largest investments by the company and making it the only one in the crypto world to own and operate a multi-asset broker.

Hidden Road clears $3 trillion per year from over 300 institutional clients across markets, and RLUSD will be used as collateral for the prime products they offer.

Ripple was reportedly also eyeing acquiring Circle, the company behind USDC, for a deal valued at $4 to $5 billion, but it seemed the offer was too low.

The same report also noted that Ripple is “still interested” in the purchase. However, a post on X by Chris Brummer, a Georgetown professor, following a conversation with Circle’s CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, completely contradicts this, suggesting that such plans never existed.

“Brad was unequivocal – Ripple never pursued an acquisition of Circle. And while he wished the company well, it wasn’t something he was considering.”

The decentralized finance (defi) of the Bitcoin blockchain may be still in its early stages compared to Ethereum, but Bitcoin defi (BTCFi) is becoming safer and cheaper.

The central participants are rootstock, one of the oldest Bitcoin Layer 2 projects, Crypto Analytics company Messari said in a “Lutstock of Lootstock” report released Thursday.

The rootstock is currently protected at 81% of the total hashrate of Bitcoin. That is, miners with hashrate approved tier 2 trades were 56% before onboarding Foundry and Spiderpool, the world’s largest and sixth largest mine pool, in February.

Messari also observed that transaction fees on rootstocks are 95% cheaper than average Bitcoin transactions and 55% cheaper than Ethereum transactions.

Rootstock is one of many projects that aim to bring greater utility to Bitcoin by expanding Defi’s regulations using smart contracts enabled in ‘BITVMX’, a modified version of the BITVM programming language. Other notable Bitcoin Layer 2 projects include Stack and Bob (“Bitcoin Build”).

The project also connects to the bridging protocol Layerzero, allowing Rowstock-Native applications to connect with dozens of other blockchains, including Ethereum and Solana. According to Messari, that momentum will set the stage for the expansion of BTCFI adoption for the remainder of 2025.

“As BTCFI continues to grow, Rootstock is suitable for wider adoption through core upgrades such as a 60% reduction in transaction fees, along with sustained investments in builder education and incentive programs.”

Read more: Bitcoin’s role in defi is “unexplored opportunities,” says Binance Research

Defi Development Corp (JNVR), formerly known as Janover, added an additional $9.9 million to Solana’s SOL to its corporate finances, pushing Crypto Hollitings to 317,273 SOL or about $48 million, the company said Wednesday.

Purchases made through Bitgo’s commercial desks include a locked sol tranch. These are tokens that are usually tied to chains or bankruptcy proceedings, and although they cannot be moved by chains yet, they are cheaper than the spot price.

“Getting access to locked discounted inventory through trusted partners like Bitgo helps us to build up some of our SOL prices below SOL, whilst gaining greater consistency with the Solana Ecosystem,” CEO Joseph Onorati said in a statement.

Renamed Defi Development earlier this week, Janover began as a real estate data and software company, but has moved to its position as a public US company that provides direct exposure to investors to the Solana ecosystem through its balance sheet. The pivot came after a group of former executives of Crypto Exchange Kraken, including Honorati, acquired a majority stake in the company this month.

The company noted that the latest purchases meant that 1.5 million outstanding shares of each are now 0.22 Sol, an up 40% from previous disclosures.

Companies have bought SoL to provide TradFi investors with exposure to tokens, and this trend has gained momentum recently. Sol Strategies has been captured by Sol Strategies, a publicly-owned company run by CEO Leah Wald, co-founder of digital asset manager Valkyrie Investments. Today, the company announced that it has secured a convertible notebook facility of up to $500 million to increase its investment in the Solana network.

read more: Janover gets pages from Saylor Playbook and doubles Sol Stack to $20 million 1700%

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Ethereum (ETH) must address its scalability constraints to sustain the growth of layer-2 (L2) networks and avoid future transaction bottlenecks, according to The DeFi Report. 

The firm said in a recent report that as L2 networks scale user adoption and transaction throughput, competition for Ethereum’s limited blob space could increase costs and undermine the network’s broader scaling roadmap.

Ethereum supports L2s through “blobs,” low-cost data storage mechanisms introduced with Ethereum Improvement Proposal 4844 (EIP-4844). However, the current capacity of three target blobs per block risks becoming inadequate. 

Even after the upcoming Pectra upgrade, which will raise the target to six blobs per block, forecasts suggest that rapid L2 expansion could outpace available bandwidth. 

Simulations show that a 10x increase in transactions per second across major L2s, such as Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism, could push transaction fees to unsustainable levels, potentially reaching $0.64 per transaction.

Although planned upgrades, such as PeerDAS and Fusaka, are expected to expand blob capacity further, projections indicate that Ethereum will need to support at least 33 blobs per block to keep L2 transaction costs below $0.02. 

Without these upgrades, Ethereum risks congestion that could threaten the viability of the L2-centric scaling strategy.

Base as a case study

Base, Coinbase’s layer-2 blockchain, provides a tangible example of the opportunities and challenges inherent in Ethereum’s current model. Since its launch, Base has generated over $106 million in user fees, onboarded more than 155 million addresses, and bridged 1.9 million ETH, representing 1.6% of Ethereum’s circulating supply. 

Applications operating on Base have accrued $768 million in cumulative fees, reflecting substantial user demand and network activity.

Since its inception, Base has also contributed approximately $4.5 million in blob and settlement fees to Ethereum’s layer-1 validators, highlighting the intended economic synergy between L2 growth and Ethereum’s revenue model. 

However, despite Base’s success in expanding Ethereum’s reach, it also exemplifies the pressure placed on L1 infrastructure. Over the past six months, Base alone has averaged 93 transactions per second, a figure that, when multiplied across several scaling L2s, raises concerns about the sustainable allocation of blob space.

Although Base drives net-new demand for Etehreum and strengthens the broader network through applications and stablecoin growth, currently securing nearly $10 billion in total value, its scaling trajectory highlights the urgent need for Ethereum to maintain affordability and speed for end users across all L2s.

Outlook for Ethereum’s L2 strategy

The L2 roadmap represents a deliberate strategic pivot for Ethereum, moving toward a business model focused on security provision, settlement, and scalability services for external networks. 

In this model, L2s such as Base could offload transaction activity from the mainnet while generating economic value through blob fees.

However, the report argues that this model’s success hinges on Ethereum’s ability to scale blob capacity without introducing prohibitive costs. 

If scaling upgrades fail to keep pace with L2 adoption, Ethereum could face competitive pressure from alternative data availability solutions or even from competing L1s that can offer lower transaction costs at scale.

Current projections suggest that if transaction volume across major L2s expands dramatically without proportional upgrades to blob throughput, Ethereum will return to current fee levels on its base layer, negating the cost benefits intended by the L2 strategy. 

Ethereum’s annualized revenue under a tenfold L2 scaling scenario would approximate $1.4 billion, roughly equivalent to its fee generation over the past year.

In summary, Ethereum’s capacity to support a flourishing L2 ecosystem depends on continuous technical progress and execution related to the mainnet.

Failing to expand blob space effectively could jeopardize its role as the backbone of decentralized applications and settlement for the next generation of blockchain infrastructure.

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