Ripple Prime, Ripple's institutional prime brokerage, has begun offering swaps on more than 100 traditional markets that trade and settle around the clock, including weekends, the company announced on Thursday . The products cover equities, equity indices, ETFs, metals, energy and foreign exchange, and market maker Virtu is already trading them.
Ripple Prime acts as principal on each trade. The swaps reference perpetual futures listed by Trade.xyz on Hyperliquid, the decentralized derivatives exchange, so clients get price exposure to those markets while facing Ripple Prime as their only counterparty. Positions can be cross-margined against the other asset classes Ripple Prime supports, and clients can post Ripple's RLUSD stablecoin as collateral, though its availability varies by jurisdiction.
The offering is available under Ripple Prime's British Virgin Islands license. Ripple said it plans to extend it to other regions but gave no timeline.
"RWA swaps are where traditional and digital markets meet," said Michael Higgins, international CEO of Ripple Prime. Scotte Moegling, head of business development for digital assets at Virtu, said Ripple Prime's "24/7 cross-margining across asset classes helps us expand our presence more efficiently."
The launch gives traditional trading firms a regulated, intermediated route into one of the fastest-growing parts of onchain derivatives. Perpetual futures on stocks, commodities and currencies were a niche product a year ago, and open interest in these contracts across the major platforms has grown to about $9 billion, Bloomberg reported. Hyperliquid opened the door to these markets with its HIP-3 framework, which lets third parties such as Trade.xyz deploy their own perpetual markets on the exchange.
The structure also reflects the constraints institutions face. Many funds cannot connect directly to a permissionless exchange, post collateral in self-custodied wallets or take on the counterparty risk of an onchain venue. A prime broker that sits in the middle and takes the onchain exposure onto its own book removes those obstacles, while letting clients trade when U.S. and European exchanges are closed.
Ripple Prime is the former Hidden Road, which Ripple bought for $1.25 billion in 2025, and it has steadily added onchain markets to its platform. Ripple Prime had already added support for Hyperliquid before this launch and began offering crypto perpetual futures in February.
The main risk for clients is that pricing on the reference markets depends on liquidity on Hyperliquid, which can thin out on weekends when the underlying exchanges are shut and there is no official price to anchor to. How Ripple Prime manages that basis risk will be a large factor in how much institutional volume moves onto the product.