In an interview on BFM Enterprise, Ripple’s Managing Director for the UK & Europe, Cassie Craddock, lifted the veil on how the blockchain firm intends to weave the XRP Ledger into the material of prime brokerage. Talking about Ripple’s $1.25 billion acquisition of London‑headquartered Hidden Road, Craddock confirmed that the forthcoming Ripple USD‑backed stablecoin, RLUSD, “will be used as collateral,” a step she stated “essentially [enables] the bridging of the digital asset space to TradFi, which is extremely exciting.”
The Role Of The XRP Ledger
Craddock elaborated that Hidden Road’s whole publish‑commerce stack is slated emigrate onto the XRP Ledger. “The XRP ledger will be used as a post‑trade for all of Hidden Rose prime brokerage services,” she stated. With settlement finality on XRPL taking three to 5 seconds, the transfer guarantees to compress a publish‑commerce timetable that may stretch to 24 hours on conventional rails. Hidden Road processes greater than 50 million transactions every day and clears upward of $10 billion day by day; shifting that load to XRPL represents one of the crucial bold actual‑world efficiency assessments for Ripple’s twelve‑yr‑previous blockchain.
The manager highlighted the captive institutional market Ripple is buying. Hidden Road clears roughly $3 trillion yearly throughout international change, derivatives, fastened revenue, and digital belongings for greater than 300 hedge funds, market makers, and proprietary buying and selling corporations. “We see that this captive audience of 300 institutional customers is a really interesting portfolio of customers that will and do need digital‑asset infrastructure,” Craddock famous, including that the group will acquire entry to Ripple’s current cost and custody rails.
The identical viewers is anticipated to profit from RLUSD as a cross‑margin asset. Hidden Road’s mannequin already permits purchasers to publish Bitcoin or US treasuries as collateral in opposition to international‑change trades; inserting a totally‑backed greenback stablecoin into that blend opens the door to what Craddock referred to as “bridging” between crypto and legacy asset lessons. Underneath the mixing plan, RLUSD will transfer natively on the XRPL, permitting purchasers to pledge capital and settle trades in a single atomic workflow.
Outstanding crypto commentator CryptoEri underscored the operational angle in a publish on X, summarizing that “the XRP Ledger will probably handle some actual transactions (e.g., settling trades, moving RLUSD collateral) and data (e.g., recording trade details, reconciling clearing data) for Hidden Road’s post‑trade processes.” She cautioned that extra granular info must come from Ripple “and sleuths on the ledger,” however the feedback echoed Ripple’s ambition to point out the ledger working as an actual‑time clearing bus somewhat than a passive settlement layer.
Ripple’s acquisition, introduced on 8 April 2025, nonetheless awaits regulatory clearance. Hidden Road already connects to venues similar to Coinbase International, OKX, Deribit, Bitfinex, and Bullish, giving Ripple a prepared‑made distribution channel for RLUSD as soon as the deal closes. In the meantime, Craddock careworn that Ripple’s focus stays “building use cases and utility for digital assets and enabling and solving customer problems for our banking and institutional customers.”
At press time, XRP traded at $2.11.
Featured picture created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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