Summary and key takeaways

Most institutions have stopped asking whether to use stablecoins. The open question is how to run them safely at scale, and that is where the friction now sits.

Jack McDonald, SVP of Stablecoins at Ripple, joins Alice Nawfal, President and co-founder of Notabene, to talk through what that takes. Jack came to Ripple through its acquisition of Standard Custody & Trust, the institutional custodian he co-founded in 2018. Before that he spent more than a decade running a broker-dealer and fund administration business, so he approaches stablecoins as an operator.

His view is that the settlement infrastructure institutions need largely exists today, and that US regulation has moved from headwind to tailwind since the GENIUS Act. What remains is education and trust. Institutions need to understand what each counterparty's license means and who sits on the other side of a transaction. They also need to accept that a cross-border payment is only as good as its last-mile payout, which is where newer entrants most often underestimate the work.

Jack explains why Ripple made a strategic investment in Notabene, what changes when RLUSD runs inside Notabene Flow, and why RLUSD's daily activity matters more to him than its market cap. He also describes how Ripple is bringing 1,400 corporate treasury customers on chain, starting at the crawl stage.

He closes with a test for success: the day an operator stops switching between a TradFi screen and a digital asset screen.

Key takeaways

1. The infrastructure is largely built. Jack sees three factors in institutional adoption: regulatory clarity, infrastructure, and education. Infrastructure is mostly in place, and education is now the bottleneck.
2. Stablecoins are the easiest first step. Jack calls them the least controversial way for an institution to enter digital assets, helped by the GENIUS Act giving US stablecoins a federal framework.
3. Institutions need to know who they are dealing with. That means understanding the licenses held by the issuer, the custodian, and the payment service provider, and verifying the counterparty on the other side of each transaction.
4. The last mile decides straight-through processing. Payments into G7 banking corridors tend to run smoothly. Secondary and tertiary markets are where fragmentation shows up, and where local payout partners matter most.
5. Daily activity beats market cap as a measure of utility. RLUSD's daily activity grew from about $100M at the start of 2026 to $1.3B a day by August, according to Jack, driven by payments and capital markets use.
6. Success means one operating system. Jack's finish line is capital markets and payments running on one system, with stablecoins used as collateral and as a payment instrument, and nobody calling it crypto anymore.

Speakers

Jack McDonald, SVP of Stablecoins, Ripple

Jack leads Ripple's stablecoin business, including RLUSD. He joined Ripple in 2024 through its acquisition of Standard Custody & Trust, the New York-chartered institutional custodian he co-founded with Ripple co-founder Arthur Britto in 2018 and still leads as CEO. Before moving into digital assets, he spent more than a decade as CEO of Conifer Financial Services, which ran a broker-dealer, middle office, and fund administration business, and earlier worked on the sell side at UBS.

Links: LinkedIn · Ripple.

Alice Nawfal, President and co-founder, Notabene

Alice co-founded Notabene and leads its business and operations. She was previously Chief Operating Officer at uPort, the identity platform from ConsenSys built on Ethereum, and before that a management consultant at Bain & Company. She holds a public policy degree from the Harvard Kennedy School and an MBA from Wharton.

Links: Author page · LinkedIn