Ripple Just Made a Splash With a Huge $1.25 Billion Acquisition. Will It Be a Game Changer for XRP?

It’s been quite the year for Ripple, the company behind XRP (XRP 0.56%), the third-largest cryptocurrency in the world. President Donald Trump’s election victory last November sent the entire crypto sector surging and few have benefited more than XRP. The token had struggled in the years leading up to the election due to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) long-standing lawsuit against Ripple for allegedly selling unregistered securities, and the subsequent appeal. But now with a pro-crypto administration, the SEC has abandoned its lawsuit against Ripple, removing a clear overhang on XRP, and the token has ripped higher during the past six months. With the SEC’s lawsuit now finished, Ripple has not wasted any time, announcing the acquisition of the prime brokerage Hidden Road for $1.25 billion.  Will it be a game changer for XRP?

What Ripple is trying to accomplish

The $1.25 billion deal is one of the largest ever in the crypto industry. The deal also makes Ripple one of the first crypto companies to own a multi-asset prime broker that operates on a global scale.

Prime brokers are often used by hedge funds and asset managers for brokerage activities at a larger scale than they could manage on a retail platform. Ripple said Hidden Road offers institutions a “one-stop shop” for a variety of services including clearing, brokerage, foreign exchange financing, digital assets, swaps, and fixed income.

Hidden Road clears $3 trillion of transactions for more than 300 institutional customers annually. Ripple’s support will enable Hidden Road to provide more capacity and also make it the largest non-bank prime broker in the world. Ripple has extensive experience with the company as a customer and invested in Hidden Road’s series B funding round.

Image source: Getty Images.

So what is Ripple trying to achieve with this acquisition? Well, the company positions itself as a leader in cross-border payments. On X, Ripple Chief Executive Officer Brad Garlinghouse said Hidden Road can “… 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.”

The crypto industry wants to become more integrated with traditional finance because investors believe that leads to more adoption. Hidden Road more or less offers Ripple a path deeper into traditional finance because Ripple’s network and recently launched stablecoin will be used in more standard financial transactions. Garlinghouse called the tie-up “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for crypto to access the largest and most trusted traditional markets, and vice versa.”

Will the acquisition be a game changer for XRP?

It’s always a bit hard to know how much of a game changer a move like this could be for a token. After all, despite the amazing rise of Bitcoin, the world’s largest cryptocurrency, people still do not use cryptocurrencies very much to pay for goods and services. Rather, cryptocurrencies are largely viewed as investments, or in Bitcoin’s case, a potential hedge against inflation and a digital form of gold.

However, the move by Ripple will certainly help it interact with more players in traditional finance, which in turn could get them more acclimated to XRP’s network, which heavily uses XRP. So the addition of HIdden Road could drive up acceptance and usage. Because cryptocurrencies don’t generate any cash flows or earnings themselves, a key thing that investors look at is utility, and if XRP can become the go-to source for payments in the financial sector, that will certainly give it an advantage over competitors.

Ultimately, XRP is one of the few cryptocurrencies I find compelling and think investors should buy. But the token is still very volatile and its price movement tends to follow that of the broader crypto sector, so I would keep positions small at this time.