XRP ETF Debuts with $5.4M in Volume, as Ripple Acquires Prime Broker for $1.5B

The first XRP exchange-traded product to launch in the United States saw over $5 million in volume on its first day of trading, yesterday, April 8, per data from Bloomberg.

The leveraged ETF, the Teucrium 2x Long Daily XRP ETF (XXRP), from Teucrium Investment Advisors launched on NYSE Arca on Tuesday. Bloomberg Senior ETF Analyst Eric Balchunas said in an X post yesterday that the volume was “very respectable,” given market conditions.

He also noted that while the day one volume put XXRP among top-performing new ETFs, it pales in comparison (by 200x) to the first day trading volume of Bitcoin (BTC) ETF IBIT from wealth management giant BlackRock.

Teucrium CEO Sal Gilbertie told Crypto Prime podcast host Nate Geraci in an interview following the launch yesterday that the firm saw “a terrific response” on the first trading day, adding: “It’s been the most successful launch day for any fund we’ve ever done.”

The leveraged ETF product for XRP launched before the approval of a spot XRP exchange-traded product, which Bloomberg’s Balchunas noted was unusual: “Very odd (maybe a first) that a new asset’s first ETF is leveraged.” Balchunas also added that while no spot XRP ETFs have been approved, “our odds are pretty high” that one will be.

XRP is currently the fourth largest cryptocurrency by market cap, trading around $2.00 at press time, up a notable 9.5% over the past 24 hours, according to data from CoinGecko.

Ripple acquires prime broker Hidden Road

In other major news from Ripple from the same day, the firm announced that it has agreed to acquire global, multi-asset (including crypto) prime brokerage Hidden Road for $1.25 billion.

With Ripple’s financial muscle, the firm said in the announcement that its goal is to help Hidden Road “become the largest non-bank prime broker globally.

Hidden Road clears $3 trillion annually across all its markets for more than 300 institutional clients, Ripple’s press release notes. Its services include clearing, prime brokerage, and financing across foreign exchange, digital assets, derivatives, swaps, and fixed income.

Hidden Road’s value to Ripple relies on its use of the RLUSD stablecoin, which launched in December and currently has a market capitalization near $294 million. Hidden Road will use the USD stablecoin as collateral across its prime brokerage products, and migrate its post-trade activity across the XRP Ledger, Ripple blockchain protocol.

Ripple CTO David Schwartz commented on X that Hidden Road clears more than $10 billion a day while processing over 50 million transactions per day, and has to wait up to 24 hours for it to settle.

“Now imagine even a portion of that activity on the XRP Ledger – and that’s exactly what Hidden Road plans on doing – not to mention future use of collateral and real-world assets tokenized on the XRPL,” Schwartz said.

Ripple was a series B investor in Hidden Road, and uses its services itself, the release notes.

Tokenizing real-world assets

Also this week, Ripple co-authored a report on tokenization with the Boston Consulting Group, which projects that the market for tokenized real-world assets will reach $9.4 trillion by 2030 and $18.9 trillion by 2033, up from $0.6 trillion today

The report predicts a three-phase evolution of this growth. The first phase is low-risk adoption, where financial institutions tokenize familiar products like money market funds and bonds. That’s already underway with firms like BlackRock, Fidelity and JPMorgan leading the way, the report said.

The second phase will be institutional expansion into complex assets like private credit and real estate. The third phase will be when tokenization becomes embedded in both financial and non-financial products, the report predicted.

Last month, The Defiant reported that Ripple had achieved a major victory in its more than four year legal battle with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over whether or not XRP is considered a security.

The SEC dropped its appeal that alleged that Ripple’s sale of XRP to retail buyers were securities sales. The sale of XRP to institutional buyers, however, were found to be unregistered securities sales, and Ripple paid a fine of $50 million to settle with the SEC last month.