- Even after Ripple spent $1.25 billion to acquire prime brokerage service company Hidden Road, XRP fell over 2%.
- Ripple aims to bring XRP Ledger and RLUSD into global brokerage services.
- XRP’s price was also affected by a broader crypto sell-off attributable to economic tensions and the new U.S. tariffs.
Ripple made headlines with a major acquisition, yet XRP’s price declined by 3% to $1.83 on April 9, 2025. In one of the biggest crypto deals ever, the company announced that it had purchased prime brokerage firm Hidden Road for the staggering sum of $1.25 billion.
According to Ripple, the move places it as the first crypto company to run a global, multi-asset prime broker. Today, Hidden Road’s platform comprises more than $3 trillion in trades annually and over 300 institutional clients.
Ripple Envision Integrating Crypto With the Traditional Financial Sector
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse doesn’t just see the price tag of the acquisition as something important; he sees it as an opportunity to connect crypto to traditional finance on a large scale.
He added that Hidden Road will make trades faster and more efficient while benefiting from the processing times of traditional banks. Across its brokerage services, both in crypto and conventional finance, Ripple will use its stablecoin, RLUSD, as collateral.
Garlinghouse also noted that Hidden Road, with Ripple’s help, is expected to grow exponentially and might become the biggest non-bank prime broker in the world. This development comes in the midst of significant growth in crypto adoption in the U.S., given that the regulatory climate is almost clear now after some changes at the SEC.
The Broader Sell-off Impact on XRP
Surprisingly, XRP was not really helped by the good news. XRP price remains 3% down in the last 24 hours, as the broader cryptocurrency market cap declined almost 4% in one day.
Analysts believe the broader sell-off is based on global economic tensions and concerns due to recent actions by President Donald Trump, including a steep 104% tariff on Chinese imports.
XRP chart. Source: CoinGecko
Today, XRP’s 24-hour trading volume is $6.45 billion, with the price fluctuating between $1.73 and $1.97 within the same period, as portrayed by data from CoinGecko. Its total market cap was $106.4 billion, and it had around 58.3 billion tokens in circulation as of the time of writing.
This year, XRP remains among the best-performing digital assets, even though it’s now down about 50% from the $2.82 peak it achieved in February 2025.
