Ripple Swaps Suits for Swaps: Crypto Firm Cracks Wall Street's Leveraged ETF Piggy Bank 💼

Ripple is now offering swap financing for leveraged exchange-traded funds, moving deeper into Wall Street's institutional market infrastructure through its brokerage arm, Ripple Prime. The Wall Street Journal reported the development on October 8, noting that leveraged ETF financing is a fee-generating business long dominated by banks and securities firms.

The firm is supplying financing for leveraged stock ETFs and collecting a financing fee, including roughly an 8% annualized financing rate from the Tradr 2X Long SNDK Daily ETF. Ripple Prime is collecting daily swap spreads from products that use leverage to amplify daily returns on single stocks, an area that has drawn increased interest as tighter capital and risk requirements push nonbank firms into the space.

The move is part of Ripple's broader expansion beyond cross-border payments, stablecoins, and custody into institutional services. Leveraged single-stock ETFs have grown rapidly in recent years, and the financing arrangements behind them — typically total return swaps with prime brokers — have become a key revenue source for the intermediaries involved.

By stepping into this role, Ripple joins a group of nonbank firms seeking to capture market share in swap financing as traditional prime brokers scale back exposure. The company has not publicly disclosed the total size of its ETF financing book, though the 8% rate cited on the Tradr product suggests the yields available in the segment. Ripple's entry signals continued convergence between crypto-native firms and traditional capital markets infrastructure as the boundaries between the two sectors continue to blur.