Ripple Prime will route clients into Bullish’s regulated BTC options while Ripple and OKX push RLUSD into compliant markets, extending Ripple’s $1.25b prime‑broker bet.
Summary
- Ripple is expanding its partnership with Bullish to give Ripple Prime clients direct access to Bullish’s regulated Bitcoin options market.
- Bullish says its Bitcoin options venue is the world’s second-largest crypto‑settled BTC options market by open interest.
- Ripple and OKX are also partnering to bring RLUSD to compliant markets, as Ripple Prime scales institutional brokerage after a $1.25 billion prime‑broker acquisition.
Ripple has expanded its institutional derivatives push, announcing that Ripple Prime will connect directly to Bullish’s Bitcoin (BTC) options market, opening regulated BTC options access to its institutional client base.
According to the announcement from both parties, this integration will allow Ripple Prime users to directly access Bullish’s regulated BTC options market, which Bullish describes as “the second largest cryptocurrency‑settlement Bitcoin options market in the world by open interest” and one that already supports spot, perpetual contracts and dated futures.
The move deepens a long‑running partnership between the two firms and comes as Bullish, listed on the NYSE under the ticker BLSH, continues to position itself as an institution‑first venue focused on Bitcoin and Ethereum liquidity after reporting $80.5 billion in monthly trading volume in October 2025.
Ripple Prime scales after $1.25b prime‑broker bet
In addition, both parties revealed that OKX has reached a strategic partnership with Ripple to introduce the stablecoin RLUSD (Ripple USD) in compliant markets, with RLUSD now live on OKX for spot trading across more than 280 pairs and usable as institutional‑grade margin collateral for derivatives.
Ripple Prime, as one of the largest non‑bank prime brokers globally, has exceeded a clearing scale of $30 trillion in 2025 and can provide multi‑asset brokerage, clearing, and financing services, building on Ripple’s $1.25 billion acquisition of multi‑asset prime broker Hidden Road that made it, in Ripple’s words, “the first crypto company to own and operate a global, multi‑asset prime broker.”
In an earlier Reuters report, Ripple said the Hidden Road deal would help create a “one‑stop‑shop” for institutional clients across foreign exchange, digital assets, derivatives, swaps and fixed income, while a follow‑up BusinessWire release emphasized that RLUSD is intended as “enterprise‑grade” collateral across that stack.
For crypto traders, the tie‑up between Ripple Prime and Bullish folds a large BTC options venue into a rapidly scaling prime‑broker platform just as macro uncertainty keeps demand high for hedging and basis trades, echoing themes raised in a recent crypto.news story on how rate‑cut delays are reshaping institutional risk‑taking.
The RLUSD expansion also builds on wider Middle East and Strait of Hormuz coverage from crypto.news, where prior stories have tracked how geopolitical chokepoints and energy costs feed back into liquidity conditions for assets such as Bitcoin and XRP (XRP), dynamics institutional desks on Ripple Prime and Bullish will now be able to express more precisely through BTC options and stablecoin‑collateralized derivatives.
