Ripple Integrating Hyperliquid Into Its Prime Brokerage Platform To Broaden Institutional DeFi Access Fails To Bump XRP Bulls ⋆ ZyCrypto

XRP experienced a sharp decline on Thursday, losing the $1.30 support for the first time in over 15 months amid a broader crypto market downtrend.

The sell-off coincided with a major industry milestone: Ripple’s integration of the fast-growing decentralized derivatives exchange (DEX) Hyperliquid into its institutional prime brokerage platform, Ripple Prime.

Ripple Prime Integrates Hyperliquid

Blockchain payments company Ripple has expanded its institutional prime brokerage offering by adding support for Hyperliquid.

The Ripple Prime integration allows institutional customers to access on-chain perpetuals liquidity while cross-margining their decentralized finance (DeFi) positions with other asset classes, including crypto such as XRP and Ripple’s U.S. dollar stablecoin RLUSD, foreign exchange, fixed income, over-the-counter swaps, and more, within the same prime brokerage platform.

U.S. clients will continue to face Ripple Prime as their sole counterparty. This means that positions across platforms will be managed under a single risk and margin framework inside Ripple Prime. 

“This strategic extension of our prime brokerage platform into DeFi will enhance our clients’ access to liquidity, providing the greater efficiency and innovation that our institutional clients demand,” Ripple Prime International CEO Michael Higgins said in a statement.

The integration with Hyperliquid marks Ripple Prime’s “first DeFi venue.” The move comes amid increasing interoperability in the sector. Earlier this year, Flare, a blockchain focused on interoperability, debuted the first XRP spot market on Hyperliquid by listing FXRP for spot trading. 

Ripple Prime was created following Ripple’s acquisition of crypto-friendly prime broker Hidden Road as part of a $1.25 billion deal disclosed in April 2025 and finalized in October of the same year, combining its regulatory licenses with Hidden Road’s prime brokerage infrastructure. The business, which was rebranded as Ripple Prime, now serves over 300 institutional clients with over $3 trillion cleared across markets, per Ripple’s website.

The launch of Ripple Prime arguably extends Ripple’s institutional push beyond payments and custody into a wider set of broker-dealer-like services that big trading companies desire.

XRP Slides 16% In Sharp Single-Day Drop

According to CoinGecko data, the fintech firm’s XRP token was 16% lower at publication time, trading around $1.25 — representing the weakest performance among major tokens as Bitcoin and Ether plunged 8.1% and 6.9%, respectively.

$1.25 marks the lowest price for the cross-border payments asset since November 2024, when it rallied following President Trump’s election victory. 

Recent positive developments in the XRP ecosystem, including the new institutional decentralized finance (DeFi) access and e-money licenses, failed to light a fire under the bulls.