BlockBeats report, October 15: According to Bloomberg, Ripple’s prime brokerage division, Ripple Prime, is launching perpetual contracts on real-world assets (RWA) for institutional clients, covering over 100 reference markets including stocks, indices, ETFs, and commodities. The product is offered via Trade.xyz on Hyperliquid, continuing Ripple Prime’s earlier initiative to enable crypto perpetual contract trading for its clients.
This arrangement supports margin sharing across positions. Michael Higgins, CEO of Ripple Prime International, said this enhances institutional efficiency in capital utilization and position management. Clients can pair perpetual contracts with underlying assets for basis trading or use the contracts for directional trading to gain exposure to related assets during traditional market closures and weekends.
Over the past year, the open interest in RWA perpetual contracts on several major exchanges has grown from nearly zero to $9 billion. Higgins also noted that traditional hedge funds are «very close» to directly participating in the tokenized RWA market, with the key being the establishment of infrastructure that meets their counterparty and anti-money laundering requirements.