According to a recent Bloomberg report, Ripple is broadening its reach in the traditional finance space by opening up access to perpetual futures for stocks, commodities, and other traditional assets for institutional investors.
Ripple's prime brokerage arm, Ripple Prime, is launching the new service that will give institutions access to over 100 markets, including equities, stock indexes, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and commodities.
The new offerings come at a time of explosive growth in perp contracts on real-world assets, with open interest across several major platforms jumping from near zero to around $9 billion in the last year.
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Unlike traditional futures contracts, perpetual contracts don't expire, so users can hold leveraged positions without needing to roll them over into new contracts.
Ripple expands Wall Street ambitions
The new products are being rolled out via Trade.xyz, which is a large trading platform for perp contracts on traditional assets on the decentralized Hyperliquid platform.
Earlier this year, in February, Ripple Prime launched crypto perpetual futures as part of its growing efforts to offer a full trading solution for institutional investors.
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The new offering includes features like cross-margining, where investors can leverage the same collateral across different positions instead of needing separate margins for each trade.
Per Michael Higgins, the international CEO of Ripple Prime, this new setup could allow institutional users to more effectively manage their capital and access new liquidity pools.
At the same time, Higgins stressed that with this new offering, institutions can gain exposure to these markets on a "more regulated" infrastructure.
Perps futures grow in appeal to institutions
The explosion in growth for real-world asset perpetual futures has been drawing increasing interest from hedge funds and professional market makers.
As Higgins pointed out, institutional traders are now looking into various strategies around using these new instruments.
On the one hand, some investors are looking to pursue basis trades by taking positions on perps and their underlying assets to exploit price discrepancies. That would let them avoid general market exposure.
Meanwhile, Higgins indicated that traditional hedge funds are on the cusp of being able to get direct access to tokenized real-world assets.