Ripple and Water.org to Use RLUSD for Clean Water Projects

Ripple has joined Water.org as the exclusive digital-asset and payments partner for the nonprofit’s Get Blue campaign, deploying its RLUSD stablecoin to move seed funding to local microfinance partners. Water.org announced the campaign at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026 and aims to reach 200 million people with safe water by 2030. More than two billion people currently lack access to safe drinking water at home.

Under the arrangement, Ripple will route initial capital to lending institutions in Asia, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Those local partners will issue low-cost household loans for water connections and sanitation facilities, using the funds as working capital rather than one-time grants.

RLUSD is a dollar-pegged stablecoin that Ripple says is backed 1:1 with segregated cash reserves for every token in circulation. Ripple describes the token as a regulated dollar-denominated asset that recipient institutions can hold without a U.S. bank account.

Ripple and Water.org say RLUSD can reduce the time and cost of cross-border transfers compared with traditional correspondent banking. Typical transfers to microfinance partners pass through multiple correspondent banks, adding settlement delays of days and fees at each step. RLUSD is routed over blockchain rails and can deliver a dollar-equivalent asset to recipient institutions in minutes, which matters for the smaller transfer sizes common in microfinance.

Water.org plans to deploy RLUSD to seed established local lending partners that have operated the nonprofit’s low-cost loan model for years. Ripple will act as the Get Blue campaign’s exclusive payments infrastructure partner, and consumer-facing activations tied to the partnership are scheduled to begin in summer 2026.

The partnership extends RLUSD into humanitarian finance while the stablecoin has expanded into commercial infrastructure. Mastercard added RLUSD to its settlement services in June 2026. Japan’s megabanks have announced plans related to stablecoins, and regulatory limits set under the EU’s MiCA framework have affected euro-pegged stablecoin issuance.

Industry observers note barriers to wider stablecoin use in emerging markets, including limited banking access for recipient institutions and differing regulatory frameworks across countries. Ripple projected $33 trillion in on-chain stablecoin volume for 2026 and partners plan to use Get Blue as a live test of whether blockchain-based rails can move humanitarian aid funds more quickly and cheaply than traditional channels.

“Addressing the global water crisis requires collective action. We’re proud to join @Water in support of Get Blue, a campaign helping expand access to safe water for communities around the world,” Ripple wrote on its official account announcing the partnership.

The partnership places a digital payments tool into humanitarian finance where faster, lower-cost transfers may affect how quickly households gain access to piped water and sanitation.