Illustration: Gabriella Turrisi/Axios
Cryptocurrency company Ripple announced Tuesday it has agreed to acquire prime brokerage Hidden Road for $1.25 billion.
Why it matters: Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse sees the acquisition as a way to speed up its stablecoin business, which launched at the end of 2024.
- Hidden Road clears roughly $3 trillion annually across digital and traditional assets, and has some 300 institutional customers.
- Ripple sees the opportunity to eventually make its stablecoin RLUSD the default in those transactions.
- Hidden Road uses RLUSD as collateral in prime brokerage products currently.
State of play: Ripple, best known for its payments and lending businesses, owned a roughly 1% stake in Hidden Road before the deal.
Zoom in: The deal was largely cash, says Garlinghouse, with a portion paid in stock and in XRP tokens.
- Hidden Road’s investors include Greycroft, Castle island Ventures, and Dragonfly Capital and Citadel.
This comes after Stripe acquired stablecoin business Bridge for $1.1 billion earlier this year, and stablecoins in circulation have surged from $154 billion a year ago to $234 billion today, per DeFiLlama.
By the numbers: The crypto markets have been laced with dealmaking caffeine since Trump’s election, with deal values up 1,000% in Q1 2025 to $2.2 billion compared to a year earlier, per Architect Partners.
The bottom line: Stablecoins are powering crypto dealmaking right now.
