Ripple plans to buy prime brokerage firm Hidden Road for $1.25 billion, giving the crypto company a foothold in institutional finance as it pushes to expand its digital asset infrastructure.
The acquisition, announced via a press release, is said to be one of the largest in the digital asset sector to date. It marks the first time a crypto-native company will own a global, multi-asset prime brokerage platform.
Hidden Road provides institutional clients with clearing, financing, and brokerage services across digital assets, foreign exchange, derivatives, and more.
“We are at an inflection point for the next phase of digital asset adoption – the US market is effectively open for the first time due to the regulatory overhang of the former SEC coming to an end, and the market is maturing to address the needs of traditional finance,” said Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse.
Today, @Ripple announced the acquisition of Hidden Road for $1.25B, one of the largest deals ever in the crypto space. But the price tag isn’t what’s most important – it’s that this deal marks a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for crypto to access the largest and most trusted…
— Brad Garlinghouse (@bgarlinghouse) April 8, 2025
By backing Hidden Road with its own capital, Ripple aims to grow the firm’s capacity and compete with traditional brokerages. Hidden Road currently clears $3 trillion in transactions annually and serves over 300 institutional clients, according to the document. With Ripple’s funding, it expects to become one of the largest non-bank prime brokers globally.
Ripple also plans to integrate its USD-backed stablecoin, RLUSD, into Hidden Road’s operations to allow customers to use RLUSD for cross-margining between traditional and crypto positions.
In another sign of deep integration, Hidden Road will migrate its post-trade activity to the XRP Ledger, according to the press release. The announcement of the acquisition saw the price of XRP surge, with the cryptocurrency being up around 2% over the last 24-hour period.
The rise has meant that the cryptocurrency is currently outperforming the wider crypto market, with BTC being down by 0.55% and ETH, which has been underperforming over the last few months, down by 2.3%. As per data from CoinGecko, XRP is currently trading at $1.90, a slight increase of 1.7% in the last 24 hours. However, just like the rest of the crypto market, which shrunk to $2.5T, the token has suffered heavy losses, down 22.5% in the last two weeks.
The deal is expected to close in the coming months, pending regulatory approvals.
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