What is Ripple Prime, and how big is it?

The full answer

Ripple Prime is the company Ripple bought as Hidden Road. Ripple announced the $1.25 billion purchase on April 8, 2025, describing Hidden Road as “one of the fastest-growing prime brokers around the world, offering institutions a one-stop-shop of advanced services including clearing, prime brokerage, and financing across foreign exchange (FX), digital assets, derivatives, swaps, and fixed income.”[1] On October 24, 2025, Ripple wrote: “The acquisition is complete, and Hidden Road is now Ripple Prime.”[2] How the purchase fits with Ripple’s other deals is on what Ripple has bought.

What does a prime broker do?

A prime broker serves institutional investors: it clears their trades and lends to them against what they hold. Ripple’s product page lists “Multi-asset clearing, prime brokerage and financing across digital assets, FX, precious metals, exchange-traded derivatives, OTC swaps, fixed income repo and more,” and offers “OTC, sponsored access and direct market access with real-time risk management, efficient cross-margining and scalable risk-based margin financing.”[3] To explain the terms (this is not Ripple’s wording): cross-margining nets a client’s positions in different markets against each other, so it posts less collateral in total, and margin financing is lending to a client against the assets it holds.

In the US, KBRA, the credit rating agency, names the primary operating subsidiary as Hidden Road Partners CIV US LLC and describes it as “an SEC-registered broker-dealer, CFTC-registered futures commission merchant (FCM), a member of FINRA and SIPC, a clearing member of CME Group exchanges, and a member of the FICC Government Securities Division.”[4]

How big is Ripple Prime?

Ripple announced on April 8, 2025 that it was acquiring prime broker Hidden Road for $1.25 billion (company-reported).[1]

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) publishes tables of financial data for futures commission merchants, and the US firm appears in them. When Ripple announced the deal, it said it would “inject billions of dollars of capital to provide immediate scale.”[1] The CFTC reports show the change at the US firm, Hidden Road Partners CIV US LLC:

• January 31, 2025: adjusted net capital of $49,523,648 and $284,186,123 of customer assets held in segregation.[5]
• July 31, 2026: adjusted net capital of $731,397,154 and $642,769,243 of customer assets in segregation.[6]

That is about a fifteenfold rise in capital (our calculation). It covers one US entity and does not show how much of the rise came from Ripple, so it does not measure what Ripple put in. How the business has been financed since then is on how Ripple Prime is funded.

Is the $3 trillion clearing figure XRP volume?

Ripple’s page labels it “Clearing annually across markets,” and the asset classes listed run from digital assets, FX and precious metals to exchange-traded derivatives, OTC swaps and fixed income repo.[3] The product-page passages quoted on this page list those asset classes without naming XRP.[3] A clearing total counts the value of trades a firm clears over a year; it is not money held, and it is not XRP bought. The full comparison of Ripple’s large figures with actual XRP flows is on what Ripple’s trillion-dollar figures mean.

Higgins told a June 22, 2026 webinar that revenue had grown more than threefold since Ripple acquired and integrated Hidden Road, Benzinga reported [12]. ## Did Hidden Road’s client count and clearing volume change after Ripple bought it?

The published client count and clearing figure are the same as in April 2025: “more than 300” and “$3T” at the time, against “300+” and “$3T+” now.[1][3] Ripple has given growth claims in other terms. At closing it said “since the initial announcement of the acquisition, Ripple Prime’s business has grown by 3X,” in the release’s wording.[2] On May 11, 2026 it said Ripple Prime had “tripled its revenue year over year,” in its own wording.[7] Both rose over the period.[5][6]

Ripple said on May 11, 2026 that Ripple Prime had secured a $200 million facility from funds managed by Neuberger Specialty Finance, with proceeds used to extend financing to clients [7].

On August 18, 2026, Ripple said Ripple Prime had closed an upsized $275 million private placement of senior unsecured notes, rated BBB by KBRA [13].

The Crypto Times counted the two deals as $475 million of debt raised in about three months [14].

It summed up the three routes as fee burn that is negligible, collateral that is real but largely internal, and settlement that flows to the stablecoin, adding up to “a sliver” [11].

How does Ripple Prime’s size compare with bank-owned prime brokers?

The same CFTC table allows a rough comparison. At July 31, 2026, Goldman Sachs & Co LLC reported adjusted net capital of $20,705,935,631 and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC $27,801,517,105, against $731,397,154 for Ripple Prime’s US firm.[6] Goldman’s figure is about 28 times Ripple Prime’s and J.P. Morgan’s about 38 times (our calculation). The comparison is rough because the bank figures cover whole broker-dealers with many businesses besides prime brokerage, and the Ripple Prime figure covers only its US futures firm. On this one measure, Ripple Prime’s US firm is far smaller than the Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan firms.

Ripple Prime chief executive Mike Higgins compared the model to the way prime brokers helped scale foreign exchange markets in the 1990s, Benzinga reported on June 24, 2026 [12].

Benzinga’s June 2026 report listed Coinbase Derivatives and Bullish alongside EDX and Hyperliquid as integrations Ripple Prime had expanded [12].

The closest public link to the large banks is a committee seat. crypto.news reported that in May 2026 the DTCC named Ripple Prime to the roughly 50-firm working group shaping its tokenization service, alongside JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock and Citi [11].

Where does XRP fit in?

Since November 3, 2025, Ripple says, “U.S.-based institutional clients are now able to execute OTC spot transactions across dozens of the most prominent digital assets including XRP and RLUSD.”[8] Ripple has also connected Ripple Prime to outside trading venues. It said on May 19, 2026 that through EDX Markets “Clients receive enhanced capital efficiency through Ripple Prime’s credit intermediation, net settlement, and collateral management services,”[9] and on February 4, 2026 that “Ripple Prime extends its multi-asset prime brokerage platform to include Hyperliquid, a leading decentralized derivatives venue.”[10] What the EDX link adds is on the EDX Markets integration. Whether clients can borrow against XRP, and on what terms, is on does Ripple Prime accept XRP as collateral, and netting XRP against other positions is on cross-margining XRP through Ripple Prime.

What is the case that Ripple Prime’s size says little about XRP?

The strongest critique found is a crypto.news analysis published July 8, 2026. It accepted the headline number but concluded: “The $3 trillion is genuine; the fraction of it that translates into XRP demand today is small enough that no serious estimate puts a meaningful number on it.”[11] Ripple has not published a figure for XRP’s share of Ripple Prime’s activity, which would test that view, as of September 29, 2026. The wider argument about whether Ripple’s growth reaches XRP holders is on does Ripple’s success lift XRP.