Ripple USD, or RLUSD, the dollar-backed stablecoin launched by Ripple, reached an all-time high of roughly $2.4 billion in circulating supply this week, per data from CoinGecko. But a surprisingly large chunk of that stablecoin has accumulated in one place.
- The Sentora RLUSD Main vault, a crypto lending product running on Ethereum through decentralized-finance protocol Morpho, now holds roughly $393 million of RLUSD deposits, according to Morpho data.
- That is equivalent to about 16% of RLUSD's record supply.
On Sept. 1, the same vault held roughly $215 million. Its deposits have therefore jumped by about $178 million, or 83%, in less than two weeks.
For comparison, RLUSD's overall market value rose from about $2.2 billion on Sept. 1 to a record $2.4 billion as of Sept. 14, an increase of roughly $178 million.
Existing RLUSD can move into the vault without any new tokens being created and money can simultaneously enter and leave other parts of the stablecoin ecosystem.
There's no public evidence showing that the roughly $178 million increase in RLUSD supply was minted specifically to satisfy demand for this vault.
- Sentora, a firm that manages crypto lending strategies, lets RLUSD holders deposit their tokens into a vault built on Morpho.
- The vault then supplies that money into lending markets where borrowers can obtain RLUSD by posting other assets as collateral.
- Those assets can include Bitcoin and Ethereum-linked tokens as well as other crypto and tokenized financial products.
- Sentora sets the vault's risk parameters and decides where the deposited RLUSD can be deployed. In return, depositors earn yield.
- As of press time, more than half of the vault's advertised yield currently comes from incentives rather than ordinary borrower interest.
- The Coinformer reached out to Sentora and Ripple for comments and will update the story once and if the companies respond.