Ripple has revealed its purchase of Hidden Road, a global, multi-asset prime brokerage focused on digital assets and foreign exchange, for $1.25 billion. This makes it the first cryptocurrency company to run and control a multi-asset prime brokerage.
The company hopes to leverage Hidden Road’s robust infrastructure to bridge conventional banking and decentralized finance (DeFi).
Ripple Integration with Hidden Road
Since its launch in 2018, Hidden Road has achieved many remarkable milestones. These include serving more than 300 institutional clients and generating an incredible $3 trillion in annual revenue across markets.
Its services for institutional clients—including banks, hedge funds, and private equity firms—include financing, clearing, and prime brokerage for digital assets, foreign exchange (FX), derivatives, swaps, and fixed income.
Ripple intends to invest billions of dollars in Hidden Road to expand its operations and meet the rising demand for its products. This investment would allow Hidden Road to enhance its ability to serve institutional clients and explore new markets and asset categories.
Ripple USD (RLUSD), Ripple’s enterprise-grade, USD-backed stablecoin, will be integral to the integration. It will serve as collateral for Hidden Road across its prime brokerage products, making it the first stablecoin to facilitate efficient cross-margining between digital assets and traditional markets.
Furthermore, Hidden Road will transition its post-trade activities onto Ripple’s XRP Ledger (XRPL). This demonstrates XRPL’s potential as a blockchain optimized for institutional DeFi applications.
Boost to Institutional Blockchain Adoption
Besides over a decade of experience and over 60 regulatory licenses worldwide, Ripple provides solutions that securely and efficiently tokenize, store, exchange, and move digital assets. Acquiring Hidden Road advances its goal of integrating blockchain into legacy financial systems at scale.
Furthermore, this agreement might accelerate the adoption of crypto solutions across traditional financial markets by integrating Hidden Road’s financial infrastructure with Ripple’s blockchain expertise.
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