Ripple's David Schwartz is hopeful its stablecoin launches by end of year but admits there are challenges

Time is running out for Ripple to meet its target of launching its U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin by the end of the year, but the company's CTO David Schwartz hasn't lost hope.

"I'm still hopeful that we'll launch by the end of the year," Schwartz said Friday while speaking at The Block's Emergence conference in Prague. In April, Ripple announced it would launch a stablecoin initially available on XRP Ledger and Ethereum.

Ripple then began testing the Ripple USD (RLUSD) stablecoin in August. Later, in October, Ripple named Uphold, Bitstamp, Bitso, MoonPay, Independent Reserve, CoinMENA and Bullish as its exchange partners for RLUSD's launch, with market markers B2C2 and Keyrock to support its liquidity.

While optimistic about Ripple meeting its year-end launch target, Schwartz admitted the approaching holidays are an obstacle that could cause a delay.

"The annoying part for us is we're getting close to the holidays and we have partners that want to hit the ground running," he said. "I'm very hopeful that it will happen this year but unfortunately once you start running into Christmas and New Years, people are gone."

Schwartz said making sure Ripple's partners can launch in a "coordinated way" and "don't run into trouble" is a major priority. He added that the regulatory process involved is considerably laborious.

"There's a lot of moving parts involved and the big one is the stablecoin is launched through a New York state trust and it's regulated by the New York State Department of Financial Services and they are the gold standard regulator for a stablecoin ... they are going over all of our processes, compliance, and all of those things," he said. "Very much looking forward to having the launch headaches behind us, but we will get there."