
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 probably be used as collateral,” a step she stated “basically [enables] the bridging of the digital asset house to TradFi, which is extraordinarily thrilling.”
The Position Of The XRP Ledger
Craddock elaborated that Hidden Highway’s complete publish‑commerce stack is slated emigrate onto the XRP Ledger. “The XRP ledger will probably be used as a publish‑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 publish‑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 every day; shifting that load to XRPL represents one of the crucial bold actual‑world efficiency checks for Ripple’s twelve‑yr‑outdated blockchain.
The manager highlighted the captive institutional market Ripple is buying. Hidden Highway clears roughly $3 trillion yearly throughout overseas trade, derivatives, fastened earnings, 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 can and do want digital‑asset infrastructure,” Craddock famous, including that the group will acquire entry to Ripple’s present cost and custody rails.
The identical viewers is predicted to learn from RLUSD as a cross‑margin asset. Hidden Highway’s mannequin already permits purchasers to publish Bitcoin or US treasuries as collateral in opposition to overseas‑trade trades; inserting a completely‑backed greenback stablecoin into that blend opens the door to what Craddock known as “bridging” between crypto and legacy asset lessons. Underneath the mixing plan, RLUSD will transfer natively on the XRPL, permitting purchasers to pledge capital and settle trades in a single atomic workflow.
Distinguished crypto commentator CryptoEri underscored the operational angle in a publish on X, summarizing that “the XRP Ledger will most likely deal with some precise transactions (e.g., settling trades, transferring RLUSD collateral) and information (e.g., recording commerce particulars, reconciling clearing information) for Hidden Highway’s publish‑commerce processes.” She cautioned that extra granular info 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 somewhat than a passive settlement layer.
Ripple’s acquisition, introduced on 8 April 2025, nonetheless awaits regulatory clearance. Hidden Highway already connects to venues equivalent 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 pressured 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.

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