Ripple Prime opens 24/7 swaps on 100-plus markets; HSBC flags thin depth

Ripple Prime now lets institutional clients trade swaps tied to more than 100 markets, including shares, commodities and currencies, around the clock. Ripple announced the service on Oct. 15; the brokerage was formerly known as Hidden Road.

The swaps track perpetual futures listed by Trade.xyz, a platform for stock and commodity contracts on Hyperliquid, a crypto derivatives exchange. Perpetuals have no expiry date, which means a fund can take a gold position on a Sunday while conventional markets are closed. Clients deal with Ripple Prime rather than the venue directly: the broker manages collateral and risk across positions, and clients can back trades with Ripple's dollar-pegged RLUSD stablecoin.

Ripple had already connected its brokerage to Hyperliquid in February, CoinDesk reported. Trading firm Virtu is already using the service, Ripple said.

Daragh Maher, head of digital assets research at HSBC, called the launch “evolutionary, not revolutionary” in a note to clients on Monday, a copy of which CoinDesk said was shared with it. “This is a rapidly growing market but not a very big one when compared to the Trad Fi markets they are tracking,” Maher wrote.

Nearly $52 million in leveraged chip-stock positions were forcibly closed in 10 minutes on Saturday, as selling spread from Binance to Hyperliquid. The underlying shares were not trading. That left the contracts without fresh stock-market prices to follow. CoinDesk reported that the episode exposed the risks of participating in these markets.

A fund looking to trade millions of dollars still needs a counterparty willing to take the other side at an acceptable price. HSBC expects early activity to concentrate among market makers, proprietary traders and hedge funds pursuing basis trades rather than institutions seeking strategic hedges, Maher wrote. Basis trades try to profit from price gaps between related positions, such as a contract and the asset it tracks.

The bank said Ripple's success would depend on whether the service is cheaper, simpler and makes better use of clients' collateral than existing brokers and venues. “The stronger case for the product comes once there is sufficient depth for investors to express views and adjust risk when conventional markets are closed,” Maher wrote.

The market Ripple Prime is reaching is still small next to the venues it mirrors. IMF research covered by this publication on Oct. 11 found tokenized US stocks 1.5 times as volatile and less liquid than the shares they track.

Payward, Kraken's parent, is building a regulated door onto Hyperliquid, as this publication reported in September.