Ripple Prime launches perpetual futures as hedge funds near RWA entry
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Ripple's institutional trading arm has introduced perpetual futures contracts for traditional-finance clients, with Ripple's CEO indicating that hedge funds are "very close" to adopting real-world-asset products.
The rollout marks Ripple Prime's move into derivatives aimed at institutional desks accustomed to conventional markets, giving them a crypto-native route into perpetual futures trading. The comments on hedge-fund readiness, attributed to Ripple's CEO, suggest that firms long cautious about digital-asset exposure are approaching a tipping point on tokenized real-world assets, according to a post on ๐.
The launch arrives alongside a wider set of Ripple initiatives that collectively point toward deeper ties between the company's infrastructure and traditional finance. Ripple has partnered with Kyobo Life Insurance on what is described as Korea's first tokenized government bond settlement, while a cooperation agreement with Trident Digital Tech Holdings aims to build a stablecoin payment system for African markets. Separately, Ripple has proposed a new XRPL lending standard intended to let institutions borrow against tokenized assets, effectively bringing real-world credit markets onto the ledger.
Ripple's stablecoin, RLUSD, is also being tested with Unloq inside the MAS BLOOM sandbox to automate settlements tied to real-time trade conditions, a step toward more programmable finance. On the regulatory and standards side, Ripple has joined Coinbase, Kraken, and VanEck in Blockworks' Transparency Alliance to standardize token disclosures ahead of anticipated US crypto rules, and it is among the backers of the Linux Foundation's new x402 governance effort, which counts Visa and Mastercard alongside roughly 40 members supporting internet-native payments for autonomous AI agents.
Together, these moves outline Ripple's broader profile, detailed in an explainer on Ripple, as infrastructure spanning the XRP Ledger, XRP, RLUSD, and payment rails bridging banks and crypto markets. What remains unresolved is the pace and scale at which hedge funds will actually commit capital to RWA products, and whether Ripple Prime's perpetual futures offering will see meaningful institutional volume in the near term. Coverage of the Ripple Prime launch itself currently traces to a single source, leaving confirmation from additional outlets or official Ripple disclosures still to come.