Ripple vs Stellar for Payments 2026: XRP Ledger vs Stellar

A treasury analyst at a mid-sized money transfer company in Houston has two vendor decks open. One, from Ripple, promises a licensed payout network, a regulated dollar stablecoin and a bank charter in progress. The other, from a Stellar-based partner, offers an open network where MoneyGram, PayPal's stablecoin and a few hundred local cash-out firms already sit. Both say "settles in seconds". Both cost a sliver of a cent per transaction on-chain. The choice she actually faces is not between two blockchains. It is between buying a service from a company and building on a public network run by a foundation.

Is Ripple the same as Stellar?

No. In 2026 Ripple is a private US company that sells payment, custody and treasury services and issues the RLUSD stablecoin; it is closely linked to the XRP Ledger but does not own it. Stellar is a separate public blockchain, supported by the nonprofit Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), whose native asset is XLM. The two share early history and a payments focus, but they are different networks.

The confusion is understandable. Both ledgers were designed more than a decade ago for moving money rather than running general-purpose applications, both use a form of voting consensus rather than mining, and both have native assets (XRP and XLM) used mainly to pay network fees and meet account reserves. The real difference is commercial. Ripple's business is selling a product to banks and payment firms. The SDF's job is to grow an open network that companies such as MoneyGram, Circle and Paxos build on directly.

That shapes everything below. When people compare "Ripple vs Stellar", they often mean Ripple Payments vs the Stellar network, which is a comparison between a vendor and an ecosystem. We cover Ripple's corporate strategy in more depth in Ripple in 2026 and Stellar's year in our Stellar explainer.

How do Ripple and Stellar compare for payments in 2026?

For payments in 2026, Ripple offers a managed service for licensed institutions, with its own stablecoin and more than $95 billion processed through Ripple Payments. Stellar offers an open network where regulated firms issue and redeem dollars directly, now carrying PayPal's PYUSD and MoneyGram's MGUSD. Fees on both ledgers are tiny; the cost sits in on- and off-ramps.

Two caveats. The "disclosed scale" row compares different things: Ripple publishes cumulative value through its product, while Stellar's figures come from on-chain activity. And on-chain fees are only a small part of what a customer pays; foreign exchange spreads, compliance and cash-out fees dominate.

What does Ripple Payments actually offer banks and fintechs?

Ripple Payments is a licensed cross-border service in 2026: Ripple takes funds in one currency and pays out in another, using RLUSD or XRP for settlement where useful and local partners for the last mile. Ripple said in December 2025 that it had processed more than $95 billion and that its payout network covered over 90% of the global FX market.

Those figures come from Ripple's announcement of conditional OCC approval for Ripple National Trust Bank, a federally supervised trust bank, on 12 December 2025. That approval matters more to a bank's procurement team than any throughput benchmark. It means RLUSD would sit under federal oversight from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency as well as state oversight from the New York Department of Financial Services.

The customer experience is closer to using a correspondent bank than using a blockchain. A payment firm sends dollars to Ripple, Ripple handles conversion and routing, and a licensed partner credits the recipient. The firm does not need to hold XRP or run XRPL infrastructure itself. That is Ripple's pitch, and its limitation: you are buying a service with Ripple in the middle. For a step-by-step view, see our planned guide to how Ripple Payments works.

How do Stellar anchors, USDC and MoneyGram work?

On Stellar in 2026, regulated companies called anchors issue digital dollars or other assets and let users move between them and local cash or bank money. MoneyGram used USDC on Stellar for more than five years before launching its own MGUSD there in June 2026, and PayPal's PYUSD went live on Stellar in September 2025.

The anchor model means no single company sits in the middle. Circle issues USDC directly on Stellar. Paxos issues PYUSD, which the SDF announced as live on 18 September 2025, with early wallet integrations including Chipper Cash, Bitcoin.com and Lobstr. At the time, Stellar had nearly 10 million accounts and more than 20 billion operations to date.

MoneyGram is the clearest example of the model working at consumer scale. On 2 June 2026 it launched MGUSD, a dollar stablecoin issued by Stripe's Bridge under the GENIUS Act framework and running natively on Stellar, according to The Block. MoneyGram cited more than 60 million active customers and nearly 500,000 retail locations. The launch started in the US, with wider rollout planned. A family in Lagos or Manila receiving MGUSD can, in principle, collect cash at a MoneyGram counter, which is the off-ramp most blockchains lack.

Network activity has grown alongside. Nansen's Q2 2026 Stellar report counted about 4.9 million transactions a day on average, about 63,000 daily active addresses and more than $3 billion of tokenised real-world assets. Protocol 26, a network upgrade, went live on mainnet on 6 May 2026.

Which stablecoins run on the XRP Ledger and Stellar?

As of mid-October 2026, Ripple's RLUSD had about $2.4 billion in circulation, and in mid-September roughly 57% of it sat on Ethereum and 43% on the XRP Ledger. Stellar carries USDC, PayPal's PYUSD and MoneyGram's MGUSD. PYUSD, across all its chains, was about $2.9 billion, somewhat larger than RLUSD.

The chain split comes from Bitcoin.com News, citing DefiLlama on 14 September 2026: about $1.37 billion on Ethereum and $1.05 billion on the XRP Ledger, after most new supply since July went to Ethereum. Current totals come from DefiLlama. The split is revealing. Even Ripple's own stablecoin lives mostly on another chain, because that is where institutional liquidity and DeFi collateral demand sit. Both totals are small next to the overall stablecoin market of about $306 billion, of which USDT holds roughly 60% and USDC about $73 billion.

The practical point for a payments firm is availability, not market share. If a corridor partner only settles in USDC, Stellar and many other chains will do; if it settles in RLUSD through Ripple, the XRP Ledger or Ethereum are the options. Our comparison of the best blockchains for stablecoin payments covers how Ethereum, Solana, Tron and others fit in.

What does a payment actually cost on each network?

On-chain costs on both networks are far below a cent per payment in 2026. The XRP Ledger's minimum fee is 10 drops (0.00001 XRP), which is destroyed rather than paid to anyone, and Stellar's minimum is 100 stroops (0.00001 XLM) per operation, with ledgers closing in about five seconds. What users actually pay depends on exchange spreads and cash-out fees.

A worked example. A payout company sends 100,000 stablecoin payments a month on the XRP Ledger. At the reference transaction cost of 10 drops, the network fee for the whole month is 1,000,000 drops, exactly 1 XRP, though it can rise when the network is busy. Each recipient wallet must also hold a reserve: under the current XRPL reserve rules, 1 XRP base plus 0.2 XRP for the trust line needed to hold RLUSD, so 1.2 XRP locked per wallet. For a company onboarding 10,000 new recipients, that is 12,000 XRP of locked reserves, a balance-sheet item that often matters more than fees. Stellar has an equivalent rule: under its published reserve rules, an account must hold a 1 XLM minimum plus 0.5 XLM for each trustline, so 1.5 XLM per wallet holding USDC.

Now compare the whole journey. The World Bank's global average cost of sending $200 was 6.36% in Q3 2025, or $12.72. Even if the on-chain leg costs nothing, a sender still pays for converting dollars in, converting out to naira or pesos, and compliance checks. A blockchain can remove correspondent fees and delays; it cannot remove the cost of the cash counter at the end.

The ledger fee is the cheapest part of any blockchain payment. The off-ramp is where the money goes.

Have Ripple or Stellar been used for CBDCs?

Both have been used in central bank digital currency pilots, but neither runs a launched national CBDC as of 2026. Ripple said in 2023 it was working with Palau, Bhutan's Royal Monetary Authority and Montenegro's central bank on CBDC and stablecoin pilots. Stellar hosted Ukraine's electronic hryvnia pilot with TASCOMBANK and Bitt in December 2021.

Ripple's offering, reported by Finextra, is a private-ledger platform with tools for minting, distributing and redeeming tokens, plus a trial with Fubon Bank inside Hong Kong's e-HKD pilot programme. Stellar's approach used the public network: the Ukrainian pilot tested programmable payroll for public employees, peer-to-peer transfers and merchant payments under the supervision of the National Bank of Ukraine.

Context helps. The Atlantic Council tracker counted 146 countries exploring a CBDC, 41 pilot projects and just 3 launches as of May 2026. Most central banks building retail CBDCs have chosen their own or permissioned infrastructure rather than a public chain. Vendor pilots like these are best read as proofs of concept. Our CBDC tracker follows which projects have moved past that stage.

What to watch next for Ripple and Stellar

Over the next year, the questions are regulatory and commercial. Ripple needs final approval for its national trust bank and continued RLUSD growth; Stellar needs MGUSD and PYUSD to move beyond US launch markets. GENIUS Act implementing rules will apply to both stablecoin models.

• Ripple National Trust Bank. Conditional OCC approval came in December 2025. Final approval and opening would put RLUSD under direct federal supervision.
• RLUSD's chain split. Watch whether the XRP Ledger's 44% share rises. If Ripple's own coin stays mostly on Ethereum, the XRPL's role in its payment stack is narrower than its marketing suggests.
• MGUSD outside the US. MoneyGram said global scaling would follow the June 2026 US launch. The first non-US corridors will show whether stablecoin cash-out works at retail scale.
• GENIUS Act rules. The US stablecoin law, signed in July 2025, is still being turned into detailed regulations. They will shape RLUSD, PYUSD and MGUSD alike; see our GENIUS Act implementation guide.

For the analyst in Houston, the answer depends less on technology than on her company's appetite to run its own infrastructure. A firm that wants one contract and one counterparty will lean towards Ripple. A firm that wants to pick its own issuers, anchors and wallets will lean towards Stellar. Both are legitimate choices, and plenty of firms will use both.

This article explains how two payment networks work. It is not investment advice and says nothing about the price of XRP, XLM or any token. Check with a qualified adviser before making financial decisions.

About this researchMuffinPay InsightsIndependent analysis of stablecoins, CBDCs, cross-border payments and digital public infrastructure. Every figure is linked to its source. Read our editorial standards →