Moody's Ratings has assigned Ripple USD (RLUSD) an A2 rating for long-term deposits and a P-1 rating for short-term deposits, designating both marks as investment grade under the agency's stablecoin framework. The dollar token is issued by Standard Custody & Trust Company (SCTC), a Ripple unit, on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum. For firms that treat stablecoins as credit instruments, the ratings provide a formal score on reserves, liquidity, and redemptions — not a promise of the $1 peg.

What the Ratings Say About Reserves

According to Moody's ratings note, the A2 grade reflects reserve assets, their market value, and cash on hand. The agency also reviewed legal safeguards, custody arrangements, and SCTC's accounting practices.

RLUSD reserves consist primarily of cash and short-term U.S. Treasuries, assets that can fund redemptions when eligible holders request dollars. SCTC targets 103% reserve coverage, meaning $103 of reserves for every $100 of RLUSD. That buffer is a goal rather than a shield against every loss: price movements, thin markets, or operational failures can still harm the token.

The Bank of New York Mellon (BNY) holds most of the reserves, and Moody's Aa1 rating on BNY feeds into the same assessment. Standard Chartered, which launched RLUSD custody for institutional clients, follows a similar pattern: credit ratings and custody sit alongside the dollar token, not inside it.

P-1 is Moody's highest short-term deposit grade, while A2 sits in the upper-medium band of the long-term scale. On Moody's long-term scale, which runs from Aaa at the top to C, grades of Baa3 and above carry the investment-grade label — the cutoff many institutional credit policies reference when screening the instruments they may hold. Eligible holders can generally redeem RLUSD at face value within two full business days after a clean request. If the issuer enters bankruptcy, payouts can be delayed while courts access the reserves.

Limits and What the Ratings Do Not Cover

Moody's also weighed how RLUSD reserves are kept apart from SCTC's own assets. Reserves are held for the benefit of holders and redemptions, but SCTC is not bankruptcy-remote, and holders do not own the reserve assets directly today. Legal risk remains despite the safeguards.

Future grades could move with reserve quality, coverage, liquidity, and redemption speed. A major operational or cyber incident could also change the view.

The marks land as Ripple pushes deeper into institutional finance. In October 2026, Ripple won final approval to form Ripple National Trust Bank. That bank is expected to hold segregated reserves and act as a collateral trustee, separate from BNY's role as primary RLUSD reserve custodian. How that split of duties settles in practice is the concrete arrangement to watch as RLUSD's institutional footprint grows.

Ripple executive Jack McDonald has described RLUSD as the first stablecoin to earn an investment-grade mark under this Moody's framework. That claim applies within Moody's methodology only and is not a blanket statement across every scorecard.

The ratings give firms another way to weigh RLUSD's credit risk. They do not lock a $1 market price, promise instant redemption, or shield holders from every loss.