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Ripple launches Mint to make RLUSD Easier to use. Key Takeaways The platform is designed to reduce the operational work involved in moving between dollars and RLUSD. Easier issuance [...] Key Takeaways. * The platform is designed to reduce the operational work involved in moving between dollars and RLUSD. * Easier issuance could support RLUSD's growth, but only when customer demand exceeds redemptions. * Recent partnerships have expanded access to RLUSD, although detailed usage data remains limited. Ripple Mint gives approved institutional customers a direct way to issue, redeem and manage RLUSD through either a web interface or an application programming interface, commonly known as an API. The launch is not aimed at changing what RLUSD is. It changes how institutions gain access to it. Instead of handling each request through a largely manual process, a fintech, exchange or market maker can connect RLUSD operations to the software it already uses. That could matter more than the addition of another trading platform. Stablecoins become more useful to financial firms when they can be obtained, moved and redeemed without creating a separate operational process for every transaction. What minting and redeeming RLUSD actually means. RLUSD is designed to maintain a value of approximately one US dollar. New tokens are normally issued when an approved customer sends dollars to the issuer and requests the equivalent amount of RLUSD. For example, if an institution transfers $10 million and receives 10 million RLUSD, the stablecoin's circulating supply should increase by approximately $10 million. Redemption reverses that process. The customer returns RLUSD, receives dollars and the redeemed tokens are removed from circulation. Ripple Mint brings those actions into one system. Customers can initiate requests, check balances, follow a transaction from the arrival of fiat currency through onchain settlement and receive automated notifications when important steps are completed. It also supports moving RLUSD across compatible blockchains. That could help a market maker or exchange respond when demand appears on one network while most of its available liquidity is held on another. Why Ripple is launching the platform now. RLUSD has expanded into more markets and financial channels during the past two months. That wider distribution creates a need for better access to the underlying supply. The timing also reflects a wider institutional shift toward stablecoins as tools for settlement, liquidity and treasury management. Recent surveys covered by its team suggest that financial institutions increasingly view stablecoins as tools for working capital and settlement, rather than only as payment tokens. In June, Mastercard said it would support RLUSD among the regulated stablecoins available for onchain settlement across its network. RLUSD also entered another tightly regulated market in June, when Ripple's stablecoin became legally available in Japan through SBI VC Trade. The launch gives both institutional and retail customers access through a locally licensed platform. Ripple also expanded its relationship with Bitso around enterprise settlement between the United States and Latin America. Under the arrangement, RLUSD and Bitso's Mexican peso-backed MXNB are intended to support dollar-to-peso liquidity and settlement flows. Those developments increase the number of places where institutions may need RLUSD. Ripple Mint addresses the next step: helping approved firms obtain and return the stablecoin when their own customers or settlement operations require it. How Ripple could benefit. Ripple Mint moves the company closer to being an infrastructure provider rather than only the developer of a stablecoin. A financial firm that connects RLUSD issuance to its treasury, payment or trading software is building Ripple deeper into its internal operations. Replacing that connection later could require new technical work, compliance reviews and liquidity arrangements. That may make institutional relationships more durable, particularly when the same customer also uses Ripple for payments, custody or treasury services. The platform could also give Ripple a clearer view of when customers need additional liquidity, which blockchains they use and how frequently RLUSD returns for redemption. That information could help the company decide where additional banking, exchange and market-making support is needed. Ripple has not disclosed a public fee schedule for Ripple Mint or provided enough information to calculate how much direct revenue it may generate. Claims about its financial impact on the company would therefore be premature. What customers gain from the new system. The main benefit for customers is operational rather than speculative. An exchange can request more RLUSD when customer withdrawals reduce its available balance. A payments company can issue tokens when settlement demand rises. A corporate treasury can redeem balances that are no longer needed instead of keeping excess capital onchain. Through an API, those actions can be connected to internal rules. A company might request more RLUSD when its available balance falls below a certain level, while still requiring human approval before the transaction is completed. Automated notifications and shared transaction references can also make accounting easier. The same request can be followed across the bank transfer, issuance and blockchain stages rather than being reconciled through several disconnected records. Ripple Mint is available to existing RLUSD customers, not to every retail wallet. Institutions must still complete the necessary onboarding and compliance process before they can issue or redeem directly. The need for that liquidity is already visible on trading platforms. OKX has made RLUSD available across more than 280 spot pairs and as margin collateral for derivatives. In that environment, direct minting and redemption could help exchanges and market makers replenish balances as trading and collateral demand changes. Could Ripple Mint increase RLUSD's market cap? It could make growth easier, but it cannot create demand by itself. Because RLUSD is designed to remain near $1, its market capitalization is largely determined by how many tokens are in circulation. Net issuance increases the market cap, while net redemptions reduce it. Ripple reported approximately $1.5086 billion of RLUSD in circulation and $1.6191 billion in reserve funds as of July 16. The accompanying seven-day chart shows RLUSD's market capitalization rising from roughly $1.51 billion, briefly approaching $1.65 billion and then settling near $1.59 billion. That indicates that the circulating supply can change noticeably over a short period. However, the chart does not identify who issued or redeemed the tokens. It also would be inaccurate to attribute the earlier increase to Ripple Mint because the platform was announced afterward. Over time, easier access could encourage institutions to hold more RLUSD for trading, payments or treasury purposes. The effect would only be lasting if those firms keep more tokens in circulation than they return for dollars. Read more: Distribution is growing, but usage remains hard to measure. The Mastercard, SBI and Bitso announcements show that RLUSD is becoming available through more regulated financial channels. RLUSD is also moving beyond crypto-native exchanges. Interactive Brokers now allows eligible clients to convert cash into RLUSD and transfer it to an external wallet, creating another connection between traditional financial accounts and onchain liquidity. They do not yet show how much the stablecoin is being used. The recent announcements do not disclose RLUSD payment volume, the number of active institutional customers or the value of settlement flows processed through the stablecoin. They should therefore be viewed as evidence of expanding access rather than proof of adoption at scale. More useful evidence would include sustained net issuance, growth in active wallets, deeper exchange liquidity and disclosed payment or settlement volumes. Ripple Mint removes friction, not market risk. Ripple Mint solves a practical problem for firms that already want to use RLUSD. It creates a more direct connection between traditional bank dollars and the stablecoin while making transactions easier to track and automate. That could help Ripple integrate RLUSD into more payment, trading and treasury systems. It could also improve liquidity for users by making it easier for approved institutions to issue tokens when demand rises and redeem them when demand falls. The launch should not be treated as proof that RLUSD's market capitalization will continue climbing. Ripple has improved the route institutions use to access the stablecoin. The next question is whether enough of them will use that route regularly. The information provided in this article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial, investment, or trading advice.

Promptwatch raises €6M to help brands appear in ChatGPT, and the week funding split into three tiers. A seed round for AI chatbot visibility, a $1B non-equity deal for a longevity drink, and stablecoin payments close a $38M Series A. Published July 15, 2026 The capital markets are still open, but the check sizes this week tell three different stories. On one end: a €6 million seed round for a startup that wants your brand to show up when someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation. On the other: a $1 billion deal that doesn't involve equity at all, just a beverage company co-founded by a retired footballer. In between, there's a $38 million Series A for stablecoin payment rails, which is the sort of thing that makes sense only if you believe cross-border B2B payments are still broken enough to justify another layer. Promptwatch wants brands to rank in AI chatbots. Promptwatch raised €6 million in a seed round led by Seed + Speed Ventures, with Blum Ventures and Arches Capital also backing the Amsterdam startup. The pitch: help brands improve their visibility inside conversational AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and whatever Google is calling Gemini this week. The company has already opened an office in New York and says it will use the funding to expand there. The idea isn't particularly new - SEO consultants have been saying "optimize for LLMs" since late 2023 - but turning it into a funded SaaS product with enterprise contracts is the next logical step. If people are using chatbots instead of search engines to find restaurants, hotels, or software tools, then brands need a way to ensure they show up in those answers. Promptwatch is betting that most companies don't know how to do that yet and will pay someone to figure it out for them. Whether this becomes a durable category or just a feature that OpenAI and Anthropic eventually build into their enterprise tiers is the open question. For now, there's clearly investor appetite for "AI discovery" infrastructure. Velocity closes $38M to put stablecoins into business payments. Velocity announced a $38 million Series A led by Dragonfly and Firstmark, with participation from Coinbase, Capital One Ventures, QED Investors, Activant Capital, Ripple, and Wintermute. The London-based payments company is building tools that let businesses integrate stablecoins into customer checkout flows and cross-border invoicing. This is the kind of round that makes sense if you've spent any time watching a wire transfer sit in limbo for three days or trying to pay a contractor in another country without losing 4% to FX spreads and intermediary fees. Stablecoins are supposed to fix that - instant settlement, transparent fees, no correspondent banking network. The hard part has always been making it easy enough for a mid-market business to actually use without hiring a crypto-native payments engineer. Velocity's investor list is a mix of traditional fintech funds (QED, Capital One) and crypto infrastructure players (Dragonfly, Coinbase, Ripple). That split suggests the company is threading the line between "this is just better payments infrastructure" and "this only works if you believe in on-chain rails." The $38M will likely go toward compliance, integration partnerships, and convincing CFOs that stablecoin invoicing is less risky than it sounds. IM8 gets $1 billion in non-equity financing from General Catalyst. Here's where the week gets weird. IM8 secured $1 billion from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund, which is not a traditional venture fund - it doesn't take equity. Instead, it provides financing to companies in exchange for revenue share or other non-dilutive terms. IM8 is a longevity vitamin-drink startup co-founded by David Beckham, which makes this one of the stranger capital allocation decisions of the year. The structure suggests IM8 either didn't want to give up board seats or couldn't raise a traditional round at a valuation it liked. General Catalyst's fund is designed for companies with strong unit economics that need capital for manufacturing, inventory, or distribution - things that don't require giving up control. Whether a celebrity-backed beverage startup fits that profile is debatable, but $1 billion is $1 billion. This is also a signal that large institutional funds are experimenting with non-equity structures, especially for companies in categories (CPG, hardware, physical infrastructure) where venture's traditional "grow at all costs, exit in 7 years" model doesn't fit cleanly. The rest of the funding roundup. A few other deals worth noting: * Monorale AI raised £4 million in a Series A after hitting 40,000 users in eight months. The British AI platform didn't disclose what it does, which is becoming a genre. * Flex raised $70 million led by Halo Fund to build AI-powered banking tools for mid-sized business owners, per Reuters. * TYLSemi closed $43 million to help companies design their own AI chips, founded by former AlphaWave executives. * Cyera raised $600 million at a $12 billion valuation in June for AI-enabled enterprise security, especially around AI agents. The pattern: seed rounds are getting smaller and more focused, Series A checks are going to infrastructure plays (payments, chips, security), and the billion-dollar deals are either non-equity or happening in China. If you're raising right now, the tier you're in matters more than the category.