Ripple's Prime Brokerage Starts Quoting Shares and Gold Around the Clock, Using Hyperliquid's Order Books

Ripple Prime, the prime brokerage arm of the payments company, has added perpetual swaps on real-world assets for institutional clients, The Block reported. The contracts reference equities, exchange-traded funds, metals, energy and currencies, and they trade and settle around the clock. Crypto Briefing put the coverage at roughly 100 markets. The reference contracts are listed on Hyperliquid, a decentralised derivatives venue.

A perpetual swap is a futures contract with no expiry date. Rather than settling on a fixed day, it is held open indefinitely and kept in line with the underlying price by a periodic funding payment between long and short holders. The structure originated in crypto and is now being pointed at assets that already have deep, regulated markets of their own.

This is not a tokenized share

The distinction matters for anyone tracking the tokenization of equities. A tokenized stock is a claim on a share, usually backed one for one by a custodied security, and it can in principle be redeemed. A perpetual swap on a stock is a derivative: it tracks the price, pays no dividend to the holder as a matter of course, and confers no ownership. Both let someone take a position on Apple at two in the morning. Only one of them puts a share behind it.

What the 24/7 part is actually for

Equity markets close. Gold trades nearly around the clock through the loco London market but still breaks. The pitch for perpetual swaps on these assets is that a desk holding risk over a weekend, or into an Asian open, can hedge it when the primary market is shut rather than waiting for the bell. Crypto Briefing framed the launch in terms of liquidity access and risk management outside normal hours.

The plumbing is a public blockchain

What makes this notable beyond the product sheet is where the reference prices live. Hyperliquid is a public venue with its own order books, not a bank-run dark pool, and a regulated prime broker has chosen to route institutional exposure to real-world assets through contracts listed there. That is an infrastructure decision as much as a product one.

It also arrives into an unsettled regulatory picture for exactly this kind of venue. Hyperliquid's founder, Jeff Yan, told Bloomberg that United States oversight should fall on the firms that use a blockchain rather than on the network itself, CoinDesk reported. That is a position, not a ruling, and the question of who supervises what when an institutional intermediary sits in front of a permissionless venue remains open.

What to measure

The useful figures from here are not the number of markets but the depth in them. A hundred listed instruments is a list; a hundred instruments with institutional size quoting on both sides outside cash-market hours is a market. Funding rates on the equity and metals contracts will show whether anyone is actually carrying overnight risk through them, or whether the books thin out the moment the underlying exchange closes.

Neither The Block nor Crypto Briefing reported pricing, minimum sizes or which jurisdictions the service is offered in.