Ripple Prime's leveraged-ETF swaps earn Ripple fees that XRP holders do not share

Follow a two-times fund's cash through Ripple Prime and nothing in the trade requires XRP. The Wall Street Journal reported on October 7 that Ripple is now serving US leveraged ETFs ^[4]. An asset manager that wants double the daily move of a stock can buy twice the shares, or it can sign a total return swap with Ripple Prime. Ripple Prime then settles the gains and losses tied to the share price and collects a financing fee ^[5]. Large banks and brokerages have dominated that business until now ^[6]. The fee is Ripple's revenue, and it is not distributed to XRP holders, according to Sedaily ^[8].

XRP traded at $1.39 at 3:20 p.m. on October 9, down 0.38% on the day, on CoinMarketCap data cited by Sedaily ^[1]. It had lost more than 8% over the week ^[2]. Divide $1.39 by 0.92 and the token started that week at about $1.51 or higher ^[18]. The week's decline is thin evidence that traders have separated Ripple's growth from the token, because other major cryptocurrencies weakened over the same stretch ^[3].

Ripple's own product choices say more. It launched RLUSD, pegged one-to-one to the dollar, in December 2024, and Ripple Prime uses it as collateral in some transactions ^[12]. XRP can be posted as collateral there too ^[13]. A fund putting up margin can choose a dollar-pegged asset or a volatile one, and Ripple built the dollar option itself ^[12]. What Ripple is not doing is requiring XRP from the clients its prime brokerage is adding ^[8], Brevan Howard's funds among them ^[7].

The token could still benefit in three ways. XRP collateral at Ripple Prime could grow with the client book, though Ripple has not disclosed how much XRP its leveraged-ETF business uses ^[9]. Transactions on the XRP Ledger require fees paid in XRP ^[13], but those fees are small, and RLUSD also circulates on other chains such as Ethereum ^[14]. Of the Korean partnerships, the cross-border remittance work with The Jeonbuk Bank ^[10] is the kind of business Ripple grew on after its 2012 founding, with XRP as the bridge currency ^[15]. The other two, with Kyobo Life on tokenized government bonds and K Bank on digital asset wallets ^[10], sit further from it. Sedaily's caveat is that a financial institution partnering with Ripple and one actually using XRP are separate matters ^[16].

We think the evidence supports Sedaily's argument that Ripple's corporate value and XRP's investment value have to be kept apart ^[17]. Ripple concluded its SEC dispute in August 2025 and completed the Hidden Road purchase that became Ripple Prime two months later ^{[11] [19]}. The fees added since then are company revenue ^[8]. The counter-thesis is that collateral and ledger usage scale with the swap book, so client growth pulls XRP demand along behind it. A Ripple disclosure showing XRP posted as margin in proportion to swap notional would prove us wrong.