Ripple’s prime brokerage arm just landed a $200 million asset-backed debt facility from Neuberger Berman, one of the largest private asset managers in the world. The deal is designed to supercharge Ripple Prime’s margin trading and lending services across both crypto and traditional financial assets.
Neuberger Berman, which manages $567 billion in client assets, isn’t exactly a firm that writes checks on a whim.
How the facility works
Think of this like a giant credit line, but instead of maxing it out on day one, Ripple Prime can draw down the $200 million in stages. The phased approach lets the platform scale its lending capacity dynamically, matching actual client demand rather than sitting on a mountain of unused capital.
Institutional loans serve as the underlying collateral for the facility. Ripple Prime’s existing loan book backs the borrowing, creating a self-reinforcing cycle where more client activity supports more available capital.
The practical upshot for Ripple Prime’s institutional clients is a unified financing structure. Instead of juggling separate margin accounts for equities, fixed income, foreign exchange, and digital assets like XRP, everything runs through a single framework.
Ripple Prime now clears over $3 trillion annually across its platform.
The backstory: from Hidden Road to prime brokerage
Ripple Prime didn’t materialize out of thin air. The unit launched in November 2025 following Ripple’s acquisition of Hidden Road, which gave it the operational bones of a full-service prime brokerage. Hidden Road had already built out OTC spot trading capabilities across dozens of digital assets, including XRP and Ripple’s stablecoin RLUSD.
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse has been making the rounds in recent weeks, emphasizing digital asset adoption in multiple public appearances.
What this means for investors and the broader market
Ripple has projected that corporate digital asset allocations will exceed $1 trillion by the end of 2026. Corporations are moving from “we have a Bitcoin on the balance sheet” to sophisticated multi-asset digital strategies. A platform that lets them margin trade XRP alongside Treasury bonds in one account is exactly what that transition demands.
Ripple Prime isn’t the only player chasing institutional crypto prime brokerage. Coinbase Prime, Galaxy Digital, and FalconX all have their own institutional offerings. But none of them have a $200 million credit facility from a top-tier traditional asset manager backing their margin book.
The phased drawdown structure means Ripple Prime isn’t going to flood the market with leverage all at once. Instead, capital deployment will track demand, which theoretically reduces the risk of overleveraged blowups that have plagued crypto lending in the past.
Investors should keep an eye on two metrics going forward: Ripple Prime’s client acquisition rate among institutional allocators, and the pace at which the $200 million facility gets drawn down. Rapid uptake would validate the thesis that institutions are hungry for unified cross-asset margin trading.