Ripple's Prime Brokerage Push Meets XRP Ledger Growing Pains
Published on 10/09/2026 at 13:50 | Editorial boerse-global.de
Ripple is muscling into a corner of Wall Street long dominated by the big investment banks, financing equity swaps for leveraged exchange-traded funds through its Ripple Prime division. The move, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, marks a notable expansion of the company's footprint in traditional U.S. finance — even as the XRP Ledger it underpins works through a fresh round of protocol changes and a lingering validator bug.
The addressable market is substantial. According to research firm Morningstar Direct, the U.S. hosts 593 leveraged ETFs holding more than $256 billion in combined assets, with 426 of those products built as single-stock funds that deliver a leveraged bet on one company's shares. The first fund to tap Ripple's financing services is the Tradr 2X Long SNDK Daily ETF, which tracks twice the daily price move of Sandisk stock.
Tradr pays a floating fee for the swaps that back the product, tied to the Overnight Bank Funding Rate plus a spread of four percentage points. All told, the annualized cost to the fund's assets recently came to roughly 8%.
Hidden Road Deal Lays the Groundwork
Ripple built the foundation for this business through its $1.25 billion acquisition of prime broker Hidden Road, which became the Ripple Prime unit. That division now serves more than 300 institutional clients and reported regulatory net capital north of $1 billion. On Tuesday, Ripple widened its partnership with Brevan Howard, an asset manager overseeing around $35 billion for institutional clients; Ripple Prime will handle multi-asset prime brokerage, clearing and financing for the firm's funds.
Whether any of this translates into demand for XRP itself is another question. The financing operation generates revenue for Ripple but does not necessarily draw on the token or its home network — at least not yet.
Should investors sell immediately? Or is it worth buying XRP?
Protocol Upgrades Roll Out
On the infrastructure side, the XRP Ledger activated the PermissionDelegationV1_1 amendment on Thursday following weeks of validator voting. The feature lets account holders assign up to ten task-specific permissions to other accounts without handing over their primary signing keys. It is aimed squarely at institutions and asset managers that want to separate control from payment duties in day-to-day operations.
Developers, however, are urging caution on one particular permission. They warn that granting PaymentBurn could, under certain conditions, let a delegate create tokens on the ledger rather than destroy them. Newly minted units of XRP itself are not exposed to the issue.
A second amendment, BatchV1_1, was slated for its earliest possible activation window Friday afternoon. The extension would allow users to bundle as many as eight transactions on an all-or-nothing basis, provided validator support holds.
That same validator set has been contending with a software glitch: some servers stopped counting validators correctly after a routine key rotation, even though those validators kept voting. A patch designed to restore lasting identification was still under review, according to media reports.
Token Trades Sideways as ETF Money Trickles In
XRP changed hands at $1.40 on Friday, up 1.5% on the day, though it remains 51% below its 52-week high of $2.88. A separate reading earlier in the session put the token at $1.39 with a gain of 0.8%, leaving it down 6.4% over the week as rising bond yields, firmer oil prices and broad crypto selling kept risk appetite in check.
Institutional flows offered a modest counterweight. U.S. spot XRP ETFs pulled in net inflows of just over $8.16 million on Thursday, all of it into the Franklin XRP ETF. Ripple's custody and clearing partnerships are meanwhile betting on the underlying infrastructure, though such arrangements do not automatically generate immediate token demand.
The ledger's own activity underscores that institutional tilt. Evernorth reported that the network handled an average of $3.72 billion in tokenized assets during the second quarter, alongside $539 million in the RLUSD stablecoin. For holders, the open question is how tightly Ripple's prime brokerage build-out will eventually be wired into its own network — and whether that linkage is what finally turns operational wins into sustained demand for the token.
Ad
XRP Stock: New Analysis - 9 October
Fresh XRP information released. What's the impact for investors? Our latest independent report examines recent figures and market trends.
