“I am really excited to share a deal we have been working on for some time. Ripple is acquiring Hidden Road, which is a prime broker. One of the largest and dominating prime brokers.” announced Monica Long, President of Ripple, on 8 April 2025 at the Paris Blockchain Week.
This is Ripple’s largest acquisition, at $1.25 billion. Hidden Road, a global, multi-asset prime broker, is one of the fastest-growing prime brokers. The company offers institutions clearing, prime brokerage, and financing across foreign exchange (FX), digital assets, derivatives, swaps, and fixed income.
Commenting on the acquisition, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse said,“We are at an inflection point for the next phase of digital asset adoption – the US market is effectively open for the first time due to the regulatory overhang of the former SEC coming to an end, and the market is maturing to address the needs of traditional finance. With these tailwinds, we are continuing to pursue opportunities to massively transform the space, leveraging our position and the strengths of XRP to accelerate our business and enhance our current solutions and technology.”
Today, Ripple announced it is acquiring Hidden Road for $1.25B– becoming the first crypto company to own and operate a global, multi-asset prime broker. Together, Ripple and Hidden Road are bringing the promise of digital assets to institutional customers at scale, bridging…
— Ripple (@Ripple) April 8, 2025
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“RLUSD Is Off To A Strong Start,” Says Ripple President
“Ripple US dollar stablecoin, which we just launched at the end of last year in December, has now exceeded 300 million in market cap. It has done $10 billion in trading. So we’re off to a strong start,” said Long.
“Now, the reason we launched the Ripple stablecoin was because we do tens of billions of dollars in payment flows through digital assets already,” she said. “We’re already using stablecoins in those flows. And so we have a a killer use case within our core business of payments for the stablecoin.”
Hence, according to Long, the partnership with Hidden Road will then extend it (RLUSD) into more of the capital markets world.
“The CEO and founder of Hidden Road, Marc Asch, is a visionary,” said Long at the Blockchain event held in Paris. “So the idea here is that Hidden Road through its prime broker business is able to supercharge a lot of who we do.”
Meanwhile Asch said, “With new resources, licenses, and added risk capital, this deal will unlock significant growth in Hidden Road’s business, allowing us to increase capacity to our customer base, expand into new products, and service more markets and asset classes.”
“Now that we’re gonna be one joint family we will be able to kind of click the services together,” added Long. However, she reaffirmed Ripple’s excitement about its partnerships with some of the top exchanges like Kraken and Bitstamp to get distribution as well as retail distribution of RLUSD.
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Two Ts Dominating Markets Right Now – Trump And Tariffs
“This is this is the the topic of the moment,” admitted Long. “I think macroeconomic picture, we like all of you, are watching and waiting. We’re waiting to see how this plays out,” said Long talking about the impact of Donald Trump’s recent tariffs on the public markets and crypto markets.
However, Long said that in terms of how things are going in the US for the crypto industry, there is more friendliness from this administration than ever seen before.
“The the new guard at the SEC has certainly turned a page on not regulating through enforcement actions, but rather dropping those and and creating a clear path for us to move forward,” said Long. “The House and Senate both have stablecoin bills that are progressing quite a bit.”
Key Takeaways
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Ripple President says there is a lot more openness in the US than in the past.
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“The presidency as well as both houses in Congress are leaning more pro crypto and embracing the innovation behind it than they ever have before,” said Ripple President Monica Long.
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“The stablecoin bills that we’re seeing put forward are there to protect consumers. One-to-one backing, auditing reserves – things like that that are really important,” said Long.
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