Ripple Just Did Something That Could Supercharge XRP This Year and Beyond

Ripple is aiming to use XRP (CRYPTO: XRP) to do something that crypto rarely pulls off: make decentralized finance (DeFi) usable -- and useful -- for financial institutions. And in service of that goal, on Feb. 4, the company announced that its Ripple Prime platform now supports integration with Hyperliquid (CRYPTO: HYPE), a major crypto exchange for financial derivatives and tokenized real-world assets.

This is the kind of move that could potentially supercharge XRP's price for quite some time. Here's why.

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There's a big new bridge between XRP and crypto capital

Putting Ripple's play with Hyperliquid into the proper context means understanding a couple of key concepts that you might not be familiar with, so let's quickly go over them.

Ripple Prime is, as the name implies, a prime brokerage platform. For the uninitiated, a prime brokerage is the back-office layer that lets large investors at financial institutions trade multiple markets through one relationship, with consolidated margin trading, financing, and other centralized controls -- like for risk management and regulatory compliance.

Ripple Prime, which uses the XRP Ledger (XRPL) in its back end, is intended to be that layer for digital assets, and this new Hyperliquid connection is its first direct link into a DeFi venue.

Hyperliquid, for its part, is a relatively new blockchain that functions as a crypto exchange. It runs on-chain order books for financial derivatives like perpetual futures, and it offers spot trading. It's very popular among crypto natives due to its sleek interface and its easy access to leverage for various crypto assets.

Now, let's put the pieces together. If clients can keep margin and risk management inside of Ripple Prime while accessing on-chain liquidity, and then use those capabilities to invest in Hyperliquid's universe of derivatives, it substantially lowers operational frictions. So, they have an incentive to use Ripple's platform, which itself utilizes XRP. And that means there's going to be a vast amount of XRP getting used over time, which could drive its price up.

The upside is real, but it could take time

If Ripple Prime becomes a popular service for institutions to do their business with on-chain derivatives and tokenized assets, Ripple will steer more activity toward the XRP Ledger. That will be good for holders.

But Hyperliquid runs its own chain, and so it does not need XRP for any purpose. In other words, don't confuse rising activity on Hyperliquid as a surefire green flag for XRP. An institution using Hyperliquid can easily do so without ever using Ripple Prime, though some will likely choose to use it now that it's available.

In the best-case version for XRP holders, Ripple Prime clients post collateral (often stablecoins), trade on Hyperliquid, and then a lot of the workload for boring financial-plumbing tasks flows onto the XRP Ledger. The upward price pressure on XRP from that happening could last for years, presuming that both Ripple Prime and Hyperliquid remain attractive to their target users.

The weaker bull case is that Ripple Prime becomes a niche service that's rarely used as a workhorse, while the center of economic gravity stays elsewhere, most likely on Hyperliquid itself. In that scenario, XRP still gets a lift to its reputation, but due to its limited capture of value in scenarios where it isn't bearing heavy and consistent load, holders probably don't see an impressive amount of upside.

Overall, I think that this integration is quite good for XRP because it advances Ripple's targeting of institutional workflows, and it positions XRP as a tool to serve that purpose.

Still, given the miserable state of the crypto market at the moment, it's risky to buy XRP even if its fundamentals keep looking better and better. Invest in it only if you can tolerate some serious downside in the short term, and only if you already have a well-diversified crypto portfolio.

Alex Carchidi has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends XRP. The Motley Fool recommends Hyperliquid. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.