Today, @Ripple announced the acquisition of Hidden Road for $1.25B, one of the largest deals ever in the crypto space. But the price tag isn’t what’s most important – it’s that this deal marks a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for crypto to access the largest and most trusted traditional markets, and vice versa.
Prime brokers (along with other key functions historically managed by banks for the most part) like Hidden Road have proven themselves as *the* trusted intermediary for the largest hedge funds, market makers, OTC desks, quant traders and more. Ripple has been a customer of Hidden Road for years, and we know their breadth of expertise firsthand, clearing $3 TRILLION annually for 300+ of the top financial institutions globally.
This is the capital and activity that will tap into XRP and the XRP Ledger’s bread-and-butter – instant, efficient, scalable and low cost movement of value. Instead of waiting for <24 hours to settle trades through fiat rails, Hidden Road will be using XRPL for clearing a portion of trades, and most consequentially, using RLUSD as collateral across its prime brokerage services, including cross-asset (crypto and traditional instrument) trades.
With this deal and the backing of Ripple’s significant balance sheet, Hidden Road will exponentially expand its capacity to service its pipeline and become the largest non-bank prime broker globally.
Ripple and Hidden Road combined are a generational leap forward, ready to truly bring the worlds of traditional and decentralized finance together. https://t.co/UYOOyQ21dG
Crypto made its debut on @60Minutes tonight – there’s no doubt that these technologies will continue to become more and more mainstream - with influence and reach that will only continue to grow.
A few things I do want to comment on after watching:
I spoke with Margaret Brennan / 60Minutes for 90+ min straight. When discussing the SEC’s misguided lawsuit against Ripple, 60Minutes shockingly left out that a Federal Judge ruled that XRP is not a security…Gensler’s shill (John Reed Stark) knows better despite his comments that 60Minutes chose to air.
Lastly, to say crypto has no utility is exactly what the naysayers said about the Internet in its earliest days - that it’s nothing more than illicit activity. How vastly they were proven wrong. Today, even JPMorgan is coming around on blockchain… (conveniently 60Minutes also failed to mention that Ripple is doing billions of dollars of KYC-ed transactions for our institutional customers - leveraging XRP to move money cross-border more efficiently than traditional payment rails.)
https://t.co/yPe5oKTq5Q
Worksport, the truck cover guru, just tossed Bitcoin and XRP into its treasury like a kid at a candy store—manufacturing is turning digital? Watch as they bridge the gap between steel and crypto; maybe the future is more than just truckloads of cash.