Ripple Prime Opens 24/7 Stock Swaps With RLUSD Collateral — SkimNews
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- Ripple Prime launched institutional swaps tied to more than 100 stock, commodity and currency markets that trade around the clock, with clients able to post its RLUSD dollar-pegged stablecoin as collateral.
- HSBC's Daragh Maher called the launch "evolutionary, not revolutionary," warning that weekend markets are "not a very big one" compared to traditional finance and that activity will initially concentrate among market makers, prop traders and hedge funds pursuing basis trades.
- Trading firm Virtu is already using the service under Ripple's Oct. 15 announcement, with swaps tracking perpetual futures listed by Trade.xyz on the Hyperliquid crypto derivatives exchange.
- The weekend-liquidity risk surfaced Saturday when nearly $52 million in leveraged chip-stock positions were forcibly closed in 10 minutes as selling spread from Binance to Hyperliquid, while the underlying shares themselves were not trading.
- Ripple Prime — formerly Hidden Road — is offering the swaps under a British Virgin Islands license with more jurisdictions planned, expanding a broker-financing business long dominated by banks.
- Hyperliquid had already been connected to Ripple's brokerage back in February, providing the venue infrastructure that now lets funds take Sunday positions on assets like gold that conventional markets cannot move on weekends.
Why it matters: HSBC's framing that this market is "not a very big one" compared to TradFi shows institutional hedging through weekend swaps is still unproven, while the $52 million Saturday liquidation of chip-stock perps in 10 minutes demonstrates that thin liquidity is not abstract — it is the dominant risk for any early participant. Fees and volumes will likely accrue first to liquidity providers like Virtu running basis trades rather than to long-horizon funds seeking true after-hours hedges.
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