Ripple, the leading digital asset infrastructure provider to institutions, today announced it acquired Hidden Road, a multi-asset global prime broker, for $1.25 billion. This acquisition is a milestone in the global digital asset space, with Ripple becoming the first crypto company to own and offer a complete prime brokerage service.
Hidden Road, which was established in 2019, offers institutional clients one venue for clearing, prime brokerage, and financing across a variety of asset classes, including foreign exchange (FX), digital assets, derivatives, swaps, and fixed income. The company clears $3 trillion annually across markets and has over 300 institutional clients, as reported.
The deal will enable Ripple to further broaden its services from its core payment solutions to trading, custody, and lending services, important infrastructure components for wider institutional uptake of cryptocurrency. Ripple anticipates that bringing together the capabilities of Hidden Road will provide financial institutions with the framework to have trust while engaging with digital assets.
Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, stated, "We are at an inflection point for the next stage of digital asset adoption – the US market is finally open for the first time due to the regulatory overhang of the past SEC coming to an end, and the market is coalescing to satisfy the needs of traditional finance. With these tailwinds, we are still looking for opportunities to meaningfully disrupt the space, leveraging our position and the advantages of XRP to drive our business and develop our current solutions and technology."
Marc Asch, CEO and Founder of Hidden Road, commented on the acquisition: "With new capital, licenses, and incremental risk capital, this deal will bring unparalleled growth to the business of Hidden Road, allowing us to increase capacity in our customer base, expand into new products, and cover additional markets and asset classes. With Ripple, we're bringing the same trust and reliability institutional clients are familiar with in traditional markets—designed and engineered for a digital world."
This transaction will also see Hidden Road use Ripple's newly launched RLUSD stablecoin as collateral on its prime brokerage services. This should provide easier efficiency for cross-margining digital and traditional assets. Hidden Road is also moving its post-trade functions onto the XRP Ledger, which highlights its capabilities as a institutional DeFi platform.
The transaction is expected to close in the coming months, subject to regulatory approvals. The strategic buyout mirrors Ripple's commitment to becoming a full-fledged back-end infrastructure provider for institutions that are steering through the evolving landscape of digital assets.
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