Ripple is now collecting prime brokerage fees on leveraged stock trades through Ripple Prime, the rebranded Hidden Road business it acquired for $1.25 billion, marking the first time a crypto company has taken a revenue seat in a financing market long reserved for Wall Street banks.

Ripple Prime has begun booking revenue from prime brokerage fees, with the business concentrated in financing leveraged equity products, primarily through total return swaps, according to the company's disclosures. By October 2026, the unit had moved from integration to active fee generation.

How the financing works

A total return swap functions like renting a stock rather than buying it. One party receives the full gains and losses of a stock or index. The other party — in this case Ripple Prime — supplies the financing and collects a fee for doing so.

One concrete example is the Tradr 2X Long SNDK Daily ETF, a fund targeting compounded returns tied to Sandisk shares. Ripple Prime provides the financing behind that structure.

Pricing is set at OBFR plus 4%. OBFR, the Overnight Bank Funding Rate, is a benchmark for short-term interbank borrowing. On an annualized basis, the arrangement works out to roughly 8%.

Why the market matters

The leveraged ETF market is substantial. There are 593 leveraged ETFs in the United States, holding more than $256 billion in assets under management. Every one of those funds needs a counterparty on the other side of its swaps, and prime brokers fill that role.

For Ripple, the operational consequence is significant: the company now derives revenue from traditional securities financing rather than relying solely on payments infrastructure and crypto-adjacent services. The acquisition also gave Ripple something no other crypto platform has — ownership and operation of a global multi-asset prime brokerage spanning foreign exchange, derivatives, fixed income, equities and digital assets.

The deal timeline and scale

Ripple first announced the Hidden Road acquisition on April 8, 2025. The $1.25 billion deal closed in October 2025.

The numbers since then point to rapid integration:

• Ripple Prime processes over $3 trillion in annual clearing volume.
• The business serves more than 300 institutional clients.
• Ripple's business has reportedly grown threefold since the acquisition.
• The unit held over $1 billion in regulatory net capital as of late 2026.

A partnership with the asset manager Brevan Howard for multi-asset brokerage was announced around October 6, 2026, extending the unit's institutional reach.

Where the crypto pieces fit

The integration is not purely traditional finance. RLUSD, Ripple's stablecoin, is already being used as collateral within the business — a direct use case connecting the brokerage operation to Ripple's digital asset stack.

Ripple also plans to migrate certain post-trade activities to the XRP Ledger. That remains a plan rather than a completed migration, and the scope of which activities move will determine how much efficiency Ripple actually captures from settling traditional-market flows on its own blockchain infrastructure.

The structural question ahead is whether the post-trade migration to the XRP Ledger proceeds on schedule and at what scale — the answer will define whether this is a diversified financial firm with a crypto arm or a genuinely integrated operation.