Key Notes
- Ripple Prime will supply Brevan Howard funds with prime brokerage, clearing and financing across digital assets and traditional markets.
- The agreement builds on Brevan Howard affiliates’ participation in Ripple’s $500 million investment round at a $40 billion valuation in 2025.
- Brevan Howard manages about $35 billion, but the firms have not disclosed trading allocations, contract values or specific token purchases.
Ripple Prime will provide Brevan Howard funds with prime brokerage, clearing and financing across digital assets and traditional markets, expanding the relationship between the blockchain infrastructure company and the global macro and digital asset investment manager.
Ripple announced the agreement on October 6. The firms said the arrangement will give Brevan Howard access to a unified platform intended to simplify operations and improve capital efficiency across asset classes.
Brevan Howard manages about $35 billion for institutional investors, according to the announcement. That figure describes the manager’s overall assets under management; the companies did not disclose how much capital its funds will deploy through Ripple Prime.
One Prime Relationship Across Multiple Markets
Prime brokerage brings several services behind an institutional trading strategy into one relationship. A fund can use a prime broker to help access markets, clear transactions and finance positions, rather than establish a separate set of arrangements for each trading venue and lender.
Ripple’s product page describes coverage spanning digital assets, foreign exchange, listed derivatives, swaps and fixed income. The platform targets hedge funds, asset managers and other professional counterparties, with traditional-market services sitting alongside its crypto offering.
A central feature is cross-margining: eligible exposures across a portfolio can be assessed against a common collateral pool. Ripple presents this as a way to reduce fragmentation, where capital posted at one venue cannot support positions elsewhere. The financing and margin arrangements available to a particular client still depend on the products and terms involved.
For a global macro manager, the appeal is operational as well as transactional. Currency, rates and digital-asset positions can require different execution channels, while financing, margin and reconciliation remain connected parts of managing the same investment portfolio.
Brevan Howard Group COO Alan McGroarty said the firm expects the platform to provide its investment teams with “increased operational ease and capital efficiency.”
Brevan Howard Was Already an Investor
The new service agreement follows an equity relationship established in 2025. Funds managed by Brevan Howard affiliates participated in Ripple’s strategic investment, announced on November 5, which raised $500 million at a $40 billion company valuation.
The round was led by funds managed by affiliates of Fortress Investment Group and Citadel Securities. Ripple also named Pantera Capital, Galaxy Digital and Marshall Wace alongside Brevan Howard among the participating investors.
Those figures refer to Ripple’s fundraising and valuation at the time. They do not establish the amount invested by Brevan Howard individually, nor represent trading capital committed under the October 6 agreement. The latest announcement concerns services supplied to funds, extending an existing corporate relationship.
CoinScreamer previously covered the funding round as Ripple expanded beyond cross-border payments into custody, stablecoins, treasury management and institutional brokerage.
Hidden Road Became Ripple Prime
Ripple built its prime brokerage business through its acquisition of Hidden Road. It agreed to buy the non-bank prime broker for $1.25 billion in April 2025, then completed the transaction on October 24 that year and renamed the business Ripple Prime.
The acquisition gave Ripple an established clearing and financing platform across traditional and digital assets. It also created a distribution channel for the company’s blockchain infrastructure within an existing institutional brokerage business.
At the closing, Ripple said its dollar-backed stablecoin RLUSD was already being used as collateral for some prime brokerage products. Certain derivatives clients had also chosen to hold balances in RLUSD. Those disclosures described the platform’s existing use of the stablecoin; they did not identify Brevan Howard’s collateral arrangements.
Crypto Access Alongside Traditional Instruments
Ripple Prime introduced US digital-asset spot prime brokerage in November 2025, allowing institutional customers to execute over-the-counter transactions across dozens of assets, including XRP and RLUSD.
The launch added spot execution to its existing digital-asset derivatives services. Ripple said US clients could cross-margin spot transactions and holdings with other digital-asset exposures, including OTC swaps and CME futures and options.
The wider product set also includes Delta One exposure to US-listed equities, indices and digital assets. These instruments typically give investors an asset’s return through a total return swap rather than direct ownership. CoinScreamer’s coverage of Ripple Prime’s equity derivatives explains that expansion.
The Brevan Howard agreement brings a major investment manager into that broader service model. Access to a market and an investment allocation are separate decisions: a fund’s use of particular instruments will depend on its mandate, strategy and risk controls.
The companies have not published contract values, trading volumes or a breakdown of which Brevan Howard funds will use each service. They also have not announced specific XRP purchases or a requirement for the manager to use RLUSD. The confirmed development is an expanded prime-services relationship covering both traditional and digital markets.
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