Marc Asch Steps Down From Ripple Prime, the XRP-Linked Brokerage Ripple Bought for $1.25B

Asch Hands Ripple Prime to Kimmel

Marc Asch, who founded institutional prime broker Hidden Road in 2018, will leave Ripple at the end of the year, handing the business he built, now run as Ripple Prime, to a successor from inside the company. Noel Kimmel, senior vice president of Ripple Prime, takes over the unit and its team. A Ripple spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the firm is “extremely grateful” for Asch’s work as Hidden Road’s founder and confirmed Kimmel will step up once Asch moves on to pursue new opportunities. The company did not name a reason beyond Asch’s plan to pursue new opportunities, and no departure date beyond year-end was given. Asch built the brokerage after earlier roles at Steve Cohen’s SAC Capital and Point72 Asset Management. In April 2025, Ripple struck a $1.25 billion deal to buy Hidden Road, set out in the company’s own announcement, closed the purchase and rebranded the brokerage as Ripple Prime that October. The founder stayed on to work through integration, and the departure notice lands roughly one year and seven months after the deal was first disclosed. Prime brokerage, the unit’s core service, bundles the clearing, financing and market access that hedge funds would otherwise arrange venue by venue, each with its own order book. Ripple, which made its name in cross-border payments, the corridor the industry now groups under PayFi, and remains closely tied to the XRP ecosystem, has used the purchase to push into custody, stablecoins, prime brokerage and corporate treasury services. Kimmel carries a prime brokerage résumé that includes JPMorgan and Cerberus, and promoting from within is designed to limit disruption for institutional customers mid-transition. Hidden Road served hedge funds and other professional traders before the deal, and Ripple folded its infrastructure into a broader institutional push. Attention now turns to how the XRP price absorbs the change as the handoff completes at year-end.

Inside the $1.25 Billion Build-Out

The unit offers institutional clients clearing, financing and prime brokerage services that span digital assets and traditional markets, from foreign exchange and derivatives to fixed income. Since the deal closed, the business has widened its footprint on several fronts at a pace that outstrips a typical integration. Collateral and settlement sit at the center of the XRP connection. Ripple Prime uses RLUSD, the dollar stablecoin Ripple issues, as collateral across parts of its brokerage offering, and work is under way to shift post-trade processing onto the XRP Ledger. In November 2025 the unit launched digital-asset spot prime brokerage in the United States, extending institutional access to spot trading, and revenue has roughly tripled year over year since the acquisition. The product shelf expanded alongside the services. On October 15, Ripple Prime unveiled institutional perpetual swaps that reference prices across more than 100 markets, including equities, commodities and foreign exchange. The contracts track price movements rather than transferring the underlying assets, with Ripple Prime standing as counterparty to its institutional clients. The swaps launch followed the spot rollout by less than a year, giving institutions cash and derivatives access through a single counterparty. Funding followed the growth. Ripple Prime secured a $200 million credit facility from Neuberger Specialty Finance earlier this year, then raised $275 million to finance a US expansion. Hedge fund Brevan Howard counts among its clients. Ripple’s wider 2025 acquisition run included a $1 billion deal for treasury software provider GTreasury and a $200 million purchase of stablecoin payments platform Rail, both aimed at banks, asset managers and corporate clients. For the parent, the brokerage extends reach beyond payments settlement into the plumbing of institutional trading. The ledger itself has its own maintenance cycle under way: the XRP Ledger key plan requires owners to disable legacy keys by 2028.

Stakes for the XRP Ledger

For XRP holders, the reshuffle lands on a unit that increasingly touches the token’s own infrastructure. Ripple Prime already holds RLUSD as trading collateral, and the planned migration of post-trade processing to the XRP Ledger would route institutional settlement through the ledger itself. Ripple’s leadership has framed that upside before: CTO David Schwartz has argued that XRPL success would deliver a significant value share for XRP. Three markers now sit on Kimmel’s desk: whether revenue growth holds, how quickly the ledger migration advances, and whether another marquee fund follows Brevan Howard. Our earlier derivatives coverage recorded the XRP funding rate at 0.18% on Binance, a one-year high. For market levels, our XRP technical analysis has the current read, while newer investors can start with a guide on how to buy XRP.