In an interview on BFM Enterprise, Ripple’s Managing Director for the UK & Europe, Cassie Craddock, lifted the veil on how the blockchain firm intends to weave the XRP Ledger into the material of prime brokerage. Talking about Ripple’s $1.25 billion acquisition of London‑headquartered Hidden Highway, Craddock confirmed that the forthcoming Ripple USD‑backed stablecoin, RLUSD, “will likely be used as collateral,” a step she stated “primarily [enables] the bridging of the digital asset house to TradFi, which is extraordinarily thrilling.”
The Function Of The XRP Ledger
Craddock elaborated that Hidden Highway’s complete submit‑commerce stack is slated emigrate onto the XRP Ledger. “The XRP ledger will likely be used as a submit‑commerce for all of Hidden Rose prime brokerage providers,” she stated. With settlement finality on XRPL taking three to 5 seconds, the transfer guarantees to compress a submit‑commerce timetable that may stretch to 24 hours on conventional rails. Hidden Highway processes greater than 50 million transactions every day and clears upward of $10 billion each day; shifting that load to XRPL represents probably the most formidable actual‑world efficiency exams for Ripple’s twelve‑12 months‑outdated blockchain.
The chief highlighted the captive institutional market Ripple is buying. Hidden Highway clears roughly $3 trillion yearly throughout overseas change, derivatives, fastened revenue, and digital property for greater than 300 hedge funds, market makers, and proprietary buying and selling corporations. “We see that this captive viewers of 300 institutional clients is a extremely fascinating portfolio of shoppers that may and do want digital‑asset infrastructure,” Craddock famous, including that the group will acquire entry to Ripple’s current cost and custody rails.
The identical viewers is predicted to profit from RLUSD as a cross‑margin asset. Hidden Highway’s mannequin already permits shoppers to submit Bitcoin or US treasuries as collateral towards overseas‑change trades; inserting a completely‑backed greenback stablecoin into that blend opens the door to what Craddock referred to as “bridging” between crypto and legacy asset courses. Below the mixing plan, RLUSD will transfer natively on the XRPL, permitting shoppers to pledge capital and settle trades in a single atomic workflow.
Distinguished crypto commentator CryptoEri underscored the operational angle in a submit on X, summarizing that “the XRP Ledger will in all probability deal with some precise transactions (e.g., settling trades, shifting RLUSD collateral) and information (e.g., recording commerce particulars, reconciling clearing information) for Hidden Highway’s submit‑commerce processes.” She cautioned that extra granular data must come from Ripple “and sleuths on the ledger,” however the feedback echoed Ripple’s ambition to point out the ledger working as an actual‑time clearing bus relatively than a passive settlement layer.
Ripple’s acquisition, introduced on 8 April 2025, nonetheless awaits regulatory clearance. Hidden Highway already connects to venues comparable to Coinbase Worldwide, OKX, Deribit, Bitfinex, and Bullish, giving Ripple a prepared‑made distribution channel for RLUSD as soon as the deal closes. Within the meantime, Craddock careworn that Ripple’s focus stays “constructing use instances and utility for digital property and enabling and fixing buyer issues for our banking and institutional clients.”
At press time, XRP traded at $2.11.
Featured picture created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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