Ripple Prime: Inside the $1.25B Hidden Road Build-Out

Who Is Mike Higgins?

Michael Higgins is the International CEO of Ripple Prime. He joined the business — then called Hidden Road — in 2019 as Partner and Head of EMEA, was promoted to Global Head of Business Development, and became International CEO in October 2024. He spent over 20 years in electronic trading before that, including senior institutional FX roles at FXCM and co-founding the algorithmic trading firm Coronam ec in London.

When Ripple acquired Hidden Road for $1.25 billion in a deal that closed in October 2025, Higgins stayed on to run the rebranded Ripple Prime — now one of the largest non-bank prime brokers in the world.

The DTCC Connection — What's Actually Confirmed

This is the part of the story that matters most for XRP holders specifically, and it deserves precision rather than hype.

On May 4, 2026, DTCC published its Industry Working Group list for its new tokenization service — the same service whose July 2026 pilot and October 2026 full launch we've covered in detail. Ripple Prime is named on that list, sitting alongside Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Invesco, Nasdaq, NYSE, Wells Fargo, HSBC, Robinhood and 40+ other major firms.

What this concretely means, based on multiple independent reports: DTCC itself is not building its tokenization service on the XRP Ledger. Its core platform remains chain-agnostic, with Stellar separately confirmed as a public blockchain option in its multi-chain strategy. But because Ripple Prime is a working-group participant and a regulated prime broker with a live NSCC directory listing (confirmed March 2, 2026), it is positioned to let its own institutional clients route exposure onto the XRP Ledger — using XRP or RLUSD for collateral, liquidity management, or internal settlement — while the official book of record for the tokenized securities themselves stays inside DTCC's existing infrastructure.

In other words: your framing is directionally correct. DTCC doesn't need to "use XRPL" itself for the connection to matter — Ripple Prime, as a confirmed DTCC working-group participant and regulated prime broker, is the entity that can take institutional flow touching DTCC-settled assets and let clients choose to route the collateral or liquidity leg of that activity onto the XRP Ledger. Ripple is the responsible intermediary; DTCC doesn't have to change its own infrastructure for that bridge to exist.

XRP as Formal Collateral — Not Just a Payment Rail

In March 2026, Higgins made a deliberate clarification after community concern that Ripple might sideline XRP in favor of RLUSD following the Hidden Road acquisition:

This is a meaningfully different claim than "XRP is used for payments." Formal collateral status means XRP sits inside the same risk and margining framework as cash, government bonds, or other institutional-grade collateral at Ripple Prime — directly improving capital efficiency for any client already holding XRP.

RLUSD as the Settlement and Collateral Asset

Speaking on the June 22, 2026 Token Relations webinar — the source for most of this article — Higgins was explicit about why a stablecoin-native prime broker can do things a traditional one cannot:

He outlined two concrete mechanisms:

• 365-day trading instead of ~225 business days. Moving collateral 24/7 on XRPL means clients can meet margin calls on weekends — expanding the addressable market by every non-business-day hour that used to be dead time.
• Shrinking the "margin period of risk" (MPOR). Risk teams calibrate margin requirements partly around how long it takes to top up collateral. If stablecoins let clients top up instantly at any hour, margin requirements can be set tighter — which gets passed back to clients as lower costs.

The Scale of the Integration

Ripple Prime also secured a $200 million debt facility from Neuberger Berman specifically to expand margin financing capacity — a signal, in Higgins' words, of "way more demand than there is supply" in the institutional digital asset market.

Why This Matters for the Calculator

Our XRP Liquidity Calculator's DTCC scenarios already model Hidden Road / Ripple Prime as part of the institutional settlement layer. This article adds the documented basis for that assumption: Ripple Prime's working-group seat is confirmed, its $3T/year clearing volume is confirmed, and its formal XRP-as-collateral policy is confirmed. What remains genuinely open — and what the calculator's Conservative-to-Maximum range exists to capture — is how much of that $3T in cleared volume, and how much of DTCC's broader $114T custodied base, actually ends up routing collateral or settlement legs through XRPL rather than staying entirely within existing DTCC/NSCC infrastructure.

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