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 Street, Craddock confirmed that the forthcoming Ripple USD‑backed stablecoin, RLUSD, “can be used as collateral,” a step she mentioned “primarily [enables] the bridging of the digital asset house to TradFi, which is extraordinarily thrilling.”
The Position Of The XRP Ledger
Craddock elaborated that Hidden Street’s total submit‑commerce stack is slated emigrate onto the XRP Ledger. “The XRP ledger can be used as a submit‑commerce for all of Hidden Rose prime brokerage companies,” she mentioned. With settlement finality on XRPL taking three to 5 seconds, the transfer guarantees to compress a submit‑commerce timetable that may stretch to 24 hours on conventional rails. Hidden Street processes greater than 50 million transactions every day and clears upward of $10 billion every day; shifting that load to XRPL represents one of the crucial bold actual‑world efficiency exams for Ripple’s twelve‑12 months‑outdated blockchain.
The manager highlighted the captive institutional market Ripple is buying. Hidden Street clears roughly $3 trillion yearly throughout international alternate, derivatives, fastened earnings, and digital property for greater than 300 hedge funds, market makers, and proprietary buying and selling companies. “We see that this captive viewers of 300 institutional clients is a extremely attention-grabbing portfolio of shoppers that may and do want digital‑asset infrastructure,” Craddock famous, including that the group will acquire entry to Ripple’s present fee and custody rails.
The identical viewers is anticipated to profit from RLUSD as a cross‑margin asset. Hidden Street’s mannequin already permits shoppers to submit Bitcoin or US treasuries as collateral in opposition to international‑alternate 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 courses. Beneath the combination plan, RLUSD will transfer natively on the XRPL, permitting shoppers to pledge capital and settle trades in a single atomic workflow.
Distinguished crypto commentator CryptoEri underscored the operational angle in a submit on X, summarizing that “the XRP Ledger will in all probability deal with some precise transactions (e.g., settling trades, shifting RLUSD collateral) and knowledge (e.g., recording commerce particulars, reconciling clearing knowledge) for Hidden Street’s submit‑commerce 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 moderately than a passive settlement layer.
Ripple’s acquisition, introduced on 8 April 2025, nonetheless awaits regulatory clearance. Hidden Street already connects to venues comparable to Coinbase Worldwide, OKX, Deribit, Bitfinex, and Bullish, giving Ripple a prepared‑made distribution channel for RLUSD as soon as the deal closes. Within the meantime, Craddock confused that Ripple’s focus stays “constructing use circumstances and utility for digital property and enabling and fixing buyer issues for our banking and institutional clients.”
At press time, XRP traded at $2.11.
Featured picture created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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