Ripple has completed its acquisition of global prime broker Hidden Road and rebranded the company as Ripple Prime, a unified trading, financing and clearing desk for institutions, the company announced on Friday.
Ripple said the newly branded entity’s business has tripled since the initial announcement and that Ripple Prime now serves more than 300 institutional clients with over $3 trillion cleared across markets.
The company is positioning Ripple Prime as an all-in-one service spanning digital assets, foreign exchange, exchange-traded derivatives, over-the-counter swaps, interest rate clearing and repo plus precious metals, citing SOC 2 Type II compliance, real-time risk management and cross-margining.
What prime brokerage means in plain English: For funds and market makers, a prime broker is a one-stop intermediary. Instead of juggling multiple exchanges, lenders and custodians, a client uses a single desk that provides market access, extends funding so trades are not fully pre-funded, handles post-trade clearing and settlement, and aggregates collateral and risk across positions.
In traditional finance, this consolidation can reduce friction and improve balance sheet efficiency. Ripple says Ripple Prime brings a similar model to digital assets alongside currency and derivatives.
Today’s update follows Ripple’s announcement on April 8 that it intended to acquire Hidden Road for $1.25 billion. At the time, Ripple framed the deal as making it the first crypto company to own and operate a global, multi-asset prime broker.
“We are at an inflection point for the next phase of digital asset adoption,” Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said in an April 8 press release. Hidden Road founder Marc Asch said the combination would “unlock significant growth” by adding licenses and venture capital, according to the same release.
Ripple also says the prime-brokerage unit will deepen the role of RLUSD, its US dollar stablecoin. The fintech firm says some derivatives clients already have balances in RLUSD and are using it as collateral for prime brokerage products.
Ripple has previously named BNY Mellon as RLUSD’s primary reserve custodian and pointed to an “A” rating from researcher Bluechip in July 2024 for stability, governance and asset backing.
The launch of Ripple Prime expands Ripple’s institutional push beyond payments and custody to a broader set of broker-dealer-like services that large trading firms expect.
Whether assets and collateral migrate at scale will depend on customer demand, market conditions and how Ripple Prime fares against established prime brokers in both crypto and currency. For now, Ripple’s pitch to institutions is a single place for access, funding and risk control, with the option of using a company-issued stablecoin as collateral.
