Ripple acquires Hidden Road for $1.25B
A Bet on Institutional Blockchain Infrastructure
Note: This analysis was initially shared in The Weekly Stable (Vol 12): Ripple acquires Hidden Road for $1.25B on April 10th 2025.
What Happened?
Ripple has announced its $1.25 billion acquisition of Hidden Road, one of the largest deals in the digital asset space to date. With this move, Ripple becomes the first crypto company to own and operate a global, multi-asset prime broker.
The deal is structured primarily in cash, along with portions in XRP and Ripple equity, according to CEO Brad Garlinghouse. It’s expected to close in the coming months, pending regulatory approval. Hidden Road’s founder, Marc Asch, will remain on to lead the prime brokerage business within Ripple.
The acquisition signals Ripple’s intention to deepen its services for institutional clients, moving well beyond payments into the heart of capital market infrastructure.
Who Is Hidden Road and What Do They Do?
In traditional finance, hedge funds and trading firms rely on prime brokers to avoid the complexity of managing individual exchange access, fragmented collateral, and bilateral settlement. Prime brokers act as central counterparties, providing:
Unified market access
Centralized clearing and settlement
Leverage and margin financing
Credit risk management across venues
Hidden Road is one of the fastest-growing prime brokers globally. It offers clearing, prime brokerage, and financing services across FX, digital assets, derivatives, swaps, and fixed income. The firm:
Clears over $3 trillion annually
Services more than 300 top-tier institutional clients
Processes $10B+ in daily clearing volume
Handles 50M+ daily transactions across traditional rails
Hidden Road sits at the core of institutional trading infrastructure, and now, so does Ripple.
Why Did Ripple Make This Move?
The acquisition gives Ripple the infrastructure to embed its technology and assets directly into global institutional flows:
RLUSD will be integrated as collateral across Hidden Road’s platform.
Hidden Road will migrate post-trade activity to the XRP Ledger (XRPL) to improve settlement efficiency and reduce costs.
As part of this, Ripple will inject billions in capital into Hidden Road to expand capacity and meet market demand.
In the future, Ripple sees potential to optimize costs and liquidity in Ripple Payments, and offer custody services to Hidden Road’s institutional clients.
This is a mutually reinforcing deal: Hidden Road gets scale and funding; Ripple gets product distribution, infrastructure integration, and a credible entry point into the capital markets stack.
Let's dive into the key benefits.
Ripple Benefit #1: Bootstrapping RLUSD Adoption
Building a stablecoin business from scratch is tough in a crowded market. RLUSD’s growth hinges on distribution and active utility.
Historically, stablecoins like USDT, USDC, and BUSD were bootstrapped through crypto exchange usage, Bitfinex, Coinbase, and Binance, respectively, before expanding distribution.
Now, Ripple has a comparable channel:
Hidden Road is connected to Coinbase International, OKX, Deribit, Bitfinex, Bullish, and more.
Its clients can trade across these venues using one credit line and one settlement partner.
By integrating RLUSD as collateral, Ripple gets RLUSD into real institutional flows, not just for payments, but for, margin trading, cross-asset collateralization and funding strategies
Moreover, RLUSD is NYDFS-regulated and bankruptcy remote (similar to Paxos’ PYUSD and USDP), and arguably more secure than USDC/USDT. Its ability to enable cross-margining between digital and traditional markets gives it a strong enterprise use case.
If RLUSD becomes the preferred stablecoin for institutional trading, Ripple could have a meaningful early lead before others like Fidelity or BofA enter the space.
Ripple Benefit #2: Making XRPL a Backbone for Institutional Settlement
A major part of the deal is Hidden Road’s planned migration of post-trade processes to XRPL. This enables:
Instant settlement for trades that today take hours or days
Reduced counterparty and operational risk
Lower cost infrastructure for clearing
Ripple CTO David Schwartz emphasized the opportunity: Hidden Road clears $10B+ daily. Moving even a fraction of that to XRPL demonstrates blockchain’s real-world utility at scale.
“Now imagine even a portion of that activity on the XRP Ledger — and that’s exactly what Hidden Road plans on doing,” (link)
So far, XRPL’s adoption in real-world asset tokenization and institutional settlement has been limited. This deal gives Ripple the transactional volume and enterprise partner to prove it works.
Why This is Great for Hidden Road
Prime brokers require cheap and abundant funding, typically available only to banks via money markets or deposit bases. Hidden Road, being a non-bank, lacked that access, until now.
Ripple brings deep reserves:
As of Dec 2024, Ripple held 42.5B XRP, with 38B in escrow.
At $2.00/XRP, that’s an $85B warchest, with $8B+ liquid.
With this capital, Hidden Road can:
Expand services and credit lines
Scale onboarding of institutional clients
Compete as the largest non-bank prime broker globally
This acquisition follows Hidden Road’s $50M Series A in 2022 (led by Castle Island Ventures, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and Citadel Securities). Bloomberg reported in March that the company was exploring strategic options, a sale to Ripple for $1.25B seems like a great outcome.
Broader Context: Institutions and Blockchains Are Converging
This acquisition reflects a wider industry shift as U.S. regulatory sentiment is thawing, creating clearer paths for financial institutions to engage with crypto.
We’re also seeing institutional infrastructure move on-chain:
Nonco launched an FX platform on Avalanche
Codex launched a stablecoin-focused blockchain for enterprises
Ethena and Securitize introduced “Converge,” a blockchain targeting institutional finance
Ripple’s move with Hidden Road puts it squarely in the middle of this convergence, with a fully integrated stack spanning stablecoins, ledgers, capital, trading infrastructure, and regulatory credibility.
There's still a lot of execution needed to pull this off, but they have many of the right ingredients.