Ripple’s 24/7 swaps wake up the weekend, but liquidity is stuck in the loading queue

Institutional clients can now use Ripple Prime to trade swaps across more than 100 stock, commodity and currency markets around the clock, with the option of posting Ripple’s dollar-pegged RLUSD stablecoin as collateral. The product gives funds access to positions in stocks, gold and oil while conventional markets are closed.

A swap is a contract that pays out according to price movements, allowing a client to take a position without buying the underlying asset. Clients deal with Ripple Prime, the brokerage formerly known as Hidden Road, which manages their collateral and risk across positions, and can use RLUSD to back their trades. The swaps track perpetual futures listed by Trade.xyz, a platform for stock and commodity contracts on Hyperliquid, a crypto derivatives exchange. Perpetuals have no expiry date and trade around the clock, letting a fund take a gold position on Sunday while conventional markets are closed. Virtu is already using the service, Ripple said in its Oct. 15 announcement.

HSBC warned that limited liquidity could constrain large trades and initially favor market makers, proprietary traders and hedge funds. Daragh Maher, head of digital assets research at HSBC, called the launch an “evolutionary, not revolutionary” step in a note to clients on Monday, a copy of which was shared with CoinDesk. “This is a rapidly growing market but not a very big one when compared to the Trad Fi markets they are tracking,” Maher wrote. “The stronger case for the product comes once there is sufficient depth for investors to express views and adjust risk when conventional markets are closed.”

Ripple had already connected its brokerage to Hyperliquid in February. A fund seeking to trade millions still needs enough buyers and sellers to take the other side at an acceptable price. On Saturday, nearly $52 million in leveraged chip-stock positions were liquidated within 10 minutes as selling spread from Binance to Hyperliquid, forcibly closing those positions while the underlying shares were not trading.