Ripple Opens Wall Street to 24/7 Stock Trading as HSBC Flags Thin Markets

Ripple is expanding institutional access to round-the-clock trading in stocks, gold and oil through its brokerage business, allowing clients to place bets over weekends. However, HSBC cautions that limited market liquidity could prevent the service from attracting substantial institutional capital.

Daragh Maher, HSBC’s head of digital assets research, described the launch as an “evolutionary, not revolutionary” development in a note to clients on Monday. A copy of the note was shared with CoinDesk.

Maher said the market is expanding rapidly but remains relatively small compared with the traditional financial markets its products track. He argued that the service would become more valuable once sufficient liquidity allows investors to take positions and manage risk while conventional exchanges are closed.

Ripple Prime, previously known as Hidden Road, now enables clients to trade swaps linked to more than 100 markets, including equities, commodities and foreign exchange. These contracts pay out based on changes in an asset’s price, allowing traders to gain exposure without purchasing the underlying asset. Ripple announced on Oct. 15 that trading firm Virtu was already using the service.

The contracts track perpetual futures available through Trade.xyz, a platform offering stock and commodity contracts on the Hyperliquid crypto derivatives exchange. Unlike conventional futures, perpetual contracts have no expiration date and can trade continuously, allowing investors to take positions in assets such as gold even when traditional markets are closed.

Through Ripple Prime, clients can manage collateral and risk across their positions while using Ripple’s dollar-pegged RLUSD stablecoin to support their trades. The company had previously integrated its brokerage business with Hyperliquid in February.

However, executing large trades remains a challenge. Institutional investors seeking to place bets worth millions of dollars need enough counterparties willing to take the opposite side at reasonable prices. Events over the weekend demonstrated how quickly leveraged positions can become vulnerable when traditional markets are closed.

Nearly $52 million worth of leveraged positions tied to chip stocks were liquidated within 10 minutes as selling pressure spread from Binance to Hyperliquid. Because the underlying shares were not trading, the contracts lacked fresh stock-market prices to track, highlighting the risks associated with these emerging markets.

HSBC expects early trading activity to be driven primarily by firms seeking to profit from price differences between related markets rather than institutions looking for longer-term hedging opportunities.

Maher said that until market depth improves, participation will likely remain concentrated among market makers, proprietary trading firms and hedge funds pursuing basis trades. These strategies seek to capture price discrepancies between related assets or contracts.

The bank also said Ripple’s long-term prospects would depend on whether its service offers lower costs, greater convenience and more efficient use of client collateral than competing brokers and trading platforms.

Ripple is already generating fees by financing leveraged stock positions, entering a business traditionally dominated by banks, according to a CoinDesk report published earlier this month.

The new swaps are currently offered under Ripple Prime’s British Virgin Islands license, with the company planning to expand into additional jurisdictions. Although Ripple has identified an early customer, it has not disclosed the trading volume generated by the service.

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