RLUSD Just Got Roasted: $180M Gone in Hours, Rankings in Freefall

Ripple's meticulously regulated $RLUSD stablecoin just rolled out of bed and immediately face-planted onto the hardwood floor of DeFi. In just a few short hours, the company nuked more than 180 million tokens from existence—the single largest one-day supply contraction in this freshly-minted stablecoin's nascent, drama-filled history. Someone definitely isn't getting their Q1 bonus.

According to a late February Deloitte audit, $RLUSD had a circulating supply of roughly $1.56 billion. But because crypto markets have the emotional stability of a caffeinated alpaca, CoinGecko data now shows the token's market cap has been on a delightful downward spiral. Today, the circulating supply sits at 1.28 billion tokens, representing a $340 million market cap haircut from that late February peak. Ouch.

Now here's the thing: a burn isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's a standard operational mechanism—boring, really. Ripple used to burn $RLUSD tokens on Ethereum to issue them on the XRP Ledger. Think of it as moving furniture around in a house that somehow still has $340 million less furniture than last quarter.

In this case, the culprit is Gemini. The exchange executed massive redemptions at the end of Q1, cashing out hundreds of millions of dollars worth of liquidity they used for minting $RLUSD with Ripple. Gemini just redeemed—via burning—128,000,000 $RLUSD on the XRP Ledger. They wanted their liquidity back, so they burned the tokens. In crypto terms, that's basically the equivalent of returning a