In an interview on BFM Business, Ripple’s Managing Director for the UK & Europe, Cassie Craddock, lifted the veil on how the blockchain company intends to weave the XRP Ledger into the fabric of prime brokerage. Speaking about Ripple’s $1.25 billion acquisition of London‑headquartered Hidden Road, Craddock confirmed that the forthcoming Ripple USD‑backed stablecoin, RLUSD, “will be used as collateral,” a step she said “essentially [enables] the bridging of the digital asset space to TradFi, which is extremely exciting.”
The Role Of The XRP Ledger
Craddock elaborated that Hidden Road’s entire post‑trade stack is slated to migrate onto the XRP Ledger. “The XRP ledger will be used as a post‑trade for all of Hidden Rose prime brokerage services,” she said. With settlement finality on XRPL taking three to five seconds, the move promises to compress a post‑trade timetable that can stretch to 24 hours on traditional rails. Hidden Road processes more than 50 million transactions each day and clears upward of $10 billion daily; shifting that load to XRPL represents one of the most ambitious real‑world performance tests for Ripple’s twelve‑year‑old blockchain.
The executive highlighted the captive institutional market Ripple is acquiring. Hidden Road clears roughly $3 trillion annually across foreign exchange, derivatives, fixed income, and digital assets for more than 300 hedge funds, market makers, and proprietary trading firms. “We see that this captive audience of 300 institutional customers is a really interesting portfolio of customers that will and do need digital‑asset infrastructure,” Craddock noted, adding that the group will gain access to Ripple’s existing payment and custody rails.
The same audience is expected to benefit from RLUSD as a cross‑margin asset. Hidden Road’s model already permits clients to post Bitcoin or US treasuries as collateral against foreign‑exchange trades; inserting a fully‑backed dollar stablecoin into that mix opens the door to what Craddock called “bridging” between crypto and legacy asset classes. Under the integration plan, RLUSD will move natively on the XRPL, allowing clients to pledge capital and settle trades in a single atomic workflow.
Prominent crypto commentator CryptoEri underscored the operational angle in a post on X, summarizing that “the XRP Ledger will probably handle some actual transactions (e.g., settling trades, moving RLUSD collateral) and data (e.g., recording trade details, reconciling clearing data) for Hidden Road’s post‑trade processes.” She cautioned that more granular information would have to come from Ripple “and sleuths on the ledger,” but the comments echoed Ripple’s ambition to show the ledger working as a real‑time clearing bus rather than a passive settlement layer.
Ripple’s acquisition, announced on 8 April 2025, still awaits regulatory clearance. Hidden Road already connects to venues such as Coinbase International, OKX, Deribit, Bitfinex, and Bullish, giving Ripple a ready‑made distribution channel for RLUSD once the deal closes. In the meantime, Craddock stressed that Ripple’s focus remains “building use cases and utility for digital assets and enabling and solving customer problems for our banking and institutional customers.”
At press time, XRP traded at $2.11.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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