If you've ever wished stocks traded on crypto's around-the-clock schedule, this is the direction things are heading. Ripple Prime, the prime brokerage arm of Ripple, is launching perpetual swaps linked to traditional assets for institutions. Ripple, widely associated with the XRP token, is expanding beyond digital-only exposure and into tools legacy desks use daily.
These are leveraged contracts without an expiration date that reference more than 100 markets across equities, indexes, ETFs, commodities and more. The product is available via Trade.xyz, described as the largest marketplace for traditional-asset perps on Hyperliquid, one of the 24/7 venues picking up steam. It follows Ripple Prime's move in February that let clients trade crypto perpetual futures.
Crypto firms are taking their always-on infrastructure and reshaping it to look like a full-service institutional stack. Ripple Prime is leaning into classic prime-brokerage services that banks and Wall Street middlemen typically handle: arranging financing, stitching venues together, and letting clients deploy the same collateral across positions.
A key feature here is cross-margining, where funds in one account can support multiple trades. Michael Higgins, Ripple Prime's international chief executive officer, said that can help institutions put capital to work and manage risk more efficiently. "It's another liquidity source for those institutions to get access to these products," but on a "more regulated" infrastructure, he said.
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Real-world-asset perpetuals have picked up speed this year, pulling in traditional market makers and hedge funds running sophisticated strategies. Across a small set of leading venues, open interest in these contracts has grown from essentially zero to $9 billion over the last year. A related "Share of Perpetual Futures Open Interest by Asset" chart is attributed to Talos.
Ripple Prime counts Virtu, the electronic market maker, as a client that provides access to trading perpetuals tied to traditional assets.
Higgins said institutions are using the contracts in two main ways. Some pair a perp with the underlying to run a basis trade and try to capture the price spread with less market exposure. Others make straightforward directional bets on where prices are headed. He added that traditional hedge funds are "very close" to getting direct access to tokenized real-world assets, emphasizing the need to build rails that counterparties and AML teams are comfortable with.
This is one more step toward blending traditional markets with crypto's nonstop pace. If perps on stocks and commodities keep gaining traction, you could see more liquidity and price discovery outside normal trading hours and more institutional-grade tooling for managing exposure. The bigger picture is simple: infrastructure that looks familiar to big funds is moving onto 24/7 venues, and that can change when and how prices move across the assets you watch.
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