Ripple Prime features XRP not just as a tradable asset, but as a security that operates within an institutional market structure. In a March 17 interview with Jake Claver, global chief executive officer Mike Higgins said Ripple’s acquisition of Hidden Street, now rebranded as Ripple Prime, is designed to bring the best-in-class operations of sales, cleaning, maintenance and finance into one central location.
Higgins introduced Ripple Prime as an access framework for companies trading in both traditional and digital markets. The main idea, he said, is that those markets are no longer separate for a long time, and institutions will need access to the balance-sheet, the corresponding flow and the separation tools that work in both.
XRP’s Role Within Ripple Prime
This is where XRP comes into the picture. Higgins said Ripple Prime has created “new ways to take XRP as collateral” and use it to fund trades, allowing institutional clients to send digital assets without liquidating them into dollars. Essentially, that means a company holding XRP can maintain a position on its balance sheet while still accessing profits or liquidity in markets that don’t naturally accept XRP.
He made a concrete example using CME futures. “If you wanted to trade futures on CME, CME doesn’t consider XRP a good security,” Higgins said. “Instead of converting that and selling that into dollars to give your exposure, what you can do with Ripple Prime is send your XRP as a positive margin. We give you dollar credit to trade on the CME, so now you can be a long position, a month-ahead future, holding a fundamental trade.”
That comparison was the basis of his argument. Higgins likened the model to traditional asset financing, where a bank lends oranges, gold or Treasuries instead of requiring the client to sell the underlying asset first. The difference now is that crypto-native collateral is starting to be recognized within institutional risk systems. For owners of assets like XRP, he said, avoiding highlighting profits and losses, preserves treasury positions and opens up additional return strategies.
He also argued that digital collateral has one structural advantage over traditional assets: it can be moved and destroyed around the clock. That is not only important in trading, but also in risk management. “If you’re doing traditional goods, they have an open and closed every day and they have weekends or long holiday periods,” Higgins said. “What you get the next day is these huge gaps. A 24/7 smooth market where you can move collateral, that collateral velocity to meet collateral calls is slowing down.”
According to Higgins, the institutional case for tokenization is broader than one asset. He pointed to Treasury operations, token repos, onchain money market products and, ultimately, token dividends as part of the same evolution. “You already have crypto as an asset class in itself. You have the use of a stablecoin,” he said. “The world is moving in an inevitable way and the speed of that is increasing now that we have already proven the concept of using the technology with crypto.”
However, he did not propose a clean handoff from legacy finance to open DeFi. Higgins has repeatedly emphasized compliance, transparency of colleagues and permitted access as prerequisites for critical institutional acceptance.
Dispersed public spaces may be gaining market share, he said, but large firms still need AML, KYC and balance sheet visibility before they can spend capital. That leaves prime brokers in a familiar role: coordinating different pools of capital while managing credit, margin and fees across the board.
At press time, XRP traded at $1.46.
The featured image was created with DALL.E, a chart from TradingView.com
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