The XRP price stands at $1.39 on Friday evening, around 1.9 percent higher than 24 hours earlier. The day's news, though, is not in the chart. Ripple has recently begun earning fees for fundi
The XRP price stands at $1.39 on Friday evening, around 1.9 percent higher than 24 hours earlier. The day's news, though, is not in the chart. Ripple has recently begun earning fees for funding leveraged funds on Wall Street, in a business that belonged to the banks for decades. If you hold XRP, there is one figure to know first: none of those fees reach the token itself.
Ripple Prime is the company's investment banking arm, and it provides funding to several issuers of leveraged ETFs through what are known as total return swaps. The service is set to be extended to hedge funds and other asset managers. The Wall Street Journal reported it first on October 7, and CoinDesk picked it up on October 8.
A total return swap is an exchange between two parties. One side promises the other the entire performance of an underlying asset, meaning price gains plus distributions, and receives a running payment in return. A fund that wants to track twice the daily move of a stock therefore does not have to buy the stock itself at twice the size. It buys the performance and pays a financing fee for it. The counterparty usually hedges its own risk through share purchases or other trades and keeps the fee.
Ripple Prime is now exactly that counterparty. The business has nothing to do with payments, with stablecoins or with the XRP Ledger. It is classic prime brokerage for American equity funds.
One specific set of terms appears in the report. The Tradr 2X Long SNDK Daily ETF, designed to track twice the daily move of the memory chip maker Sandisk, pays Ripple the Overnight Bank Funding Rate plus four percentage points. At today's level of interest rates, that works out at roughly eight percent a year.
That figure applies to a single fund and is not a company average. The terms nevertheless show how comfortable the margin is in this niche business. For comparison: a German saver on an overnight deposit currently receives a fraction of it, and the fund is not paying that rate out of distress, but because its own product construction does not work without outside funding.
According to Morningstar data cited in the coverage, there are 593 leveraged ETFs in the United States with more than $256 billion in assets under management between them. All of these products need funding on a rolling basis, and all of them pay for it.
For a long time the large banks handled that. Tighter capital and risk requirements made the business more expensive for them, and non-banks such as Jane Street, Clear Street and now Ripple Prime are moving into the gap. Ripple laid the groundwork a year earlier: the acquisition of the prime broker Hidden Road for $1.25 billion was announced in April 2025 and completed in October 2025. Hidden Road has traded as Ripple Prime since then, covering foreign exchange, derivatives, bonds, equities and digital assets. Since May the unit has raised up to $475 million through credit lines and corporate bonds, according to reports, with the bonds carrying a BBB rating. The hedge fund Brevan Howard was among the clients named.
A swap channels return through a narrow gap. The reservoir behind it, in this case the XRP supply, grows neither smaller nor larger.
This is where the company story and the token story part ways. A total return swap on an American stock is priced in dollars, collateralised in dollars and settled in dollars. No step in that chain requires XRP, and none of it creates demand for the token. Ripple the company earns. The token is left out.
That can be put in rough numbers. Apply the eight percent documented for the one fund to the up to $475 million in funding that Ripple Prime has raised since May, and you arrive at a rough ceiling of about $38 million in gross annual revenue. This is a back-of-the-envelope calculation with the method disclosed, not a company figure: there is no evidence that all of the funds are lent out at that rate, and refinancing costs are not deducted. Measured against XRP's market capitalisation of around $87 billion, even that upper figure would amount to roughly 0.04 percent. The leveraged ETF market, with its $256 billion, is on its own almost three times the size of the entire XRP supply as valued on the market, and it still does not move the token price.
One confusion is worth avoiding at this point: the American spot ETFs on XRP are an entirely different matter. There, a fund actually buys XRP and holds it in custody. Ripple Prime funds equity funds. Both stories carry the word ETF, and only one of them touches demand for the token.
On Friday evening XRP is quoted at $1.39. The daily low was $1.36 and the daily high $1.41, so the day's range covers less than four percent. Trading volume over the past 24 hours comes to around $1.88 billion, and market capitalisation stands at about $87.4 billion. That leaves the price some 62 percent below the all-time high of $3.65. The figures come from CoinGecko, as of the evening of October 9.
Those two levels are not analyst targets but the actual turning points of the current day. As long as $1.36 holds, the recovery after this week's slump stays intact. If the price drops below it, the next evidenced reference is the overnight low from Thursday into Friday, which sat between $1.32 and $1.33 depending on the data source.
On Thursday this column looked at permission delegation on the XRP Ledger and at the question of whether the $1.34 level would hold. It held. When that piece was published the price was in the same range as today, and it did not fall through $1.34 on any sustained basis during the day, not even during the overnight weakness.
Two things have changed since. Delegation has been live since October 8, so the feature update is done and no longer works as a price driver. And the funding story now puts a narrative on the table that lifts Ripple as a company without touching the token. If you took away from Thursday's piece the expectation that protocol progress carries the price, today delivers the counterpart to it.
One date remains in the calendar. Evernorth, the vehicle holding around 473 million XRP, is due to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker XRPN on October 12. cryptoticker reported that on October 2. That date affects the token directly; the swap funding does not.
In the view of this newsroom, the funding story is strong for Ripple as a company and all but meaningless for XRP as an investment. The evidence is set out above: the swaps are settled in dollars, the documented revenue sits in the tens of millions and therefore at about 0.04 percent of the token's valuation, and no stage of the transaction chain calls for XRP.
There is one counterargument that deserves to be taken seriously. Ripple itself holds a substantial amount of XRP in escrow and has historically financed itself partly by selling it. A company with running fee income from a banking business is under less pressure to release tokens. That affects supply and thereby, indirectly, the price, only weakly and with a delay, and it can only be evidenced in future escrow reports. Trading the news as a direct price driver means trading against your own arithmetic.
Which tax rule applies to an XRP product is in the key information document, not in the product marketing.
Whenever American crypto ETFs are in the news, readers in Germany face the same practical question, and the answer is a sober one. The PRIIPs Regulation, Regulation (EU) No 1286/2014, requires a standardised key information document for distribution to retail investors in the European Economic Area. American fund companies generally do not produce that document for their domestic products, because European retail distribution plays no part for them. Without it, a broker supervised in the EU may not sell the security to a retail client.
In practice that means the American spot ETFs on XRP are not available to German retail investors through ordinary brokers. Individual houses open them up to professional clients; for everyone else two routes remain, direct purchase on an exchange and the European ETP. Which products are actually tradable in Germany is set out at length in our overview of crypto ETFs in Germany.
Exchange-listed XRP products from Europe are called ETPs, ETNs or ETCs and are legally, in most cases, collateralised debt securities rather than funds. The 21Shares XRP ETP with the ISIN CH0454664043, for example, is fully physically backed with XRP according to the issuer and is held in cold storage at an institutional custodian. Its total annual cost ratio is 2.50 percent. Market overviews list further issuers as tradable via Xetra and SIX.
For tax purposes, direct purchase and an ETP are two different worlds in Germany, and the difference costs or saves a great deal of money depending on how long you hold. A direct purchase falls under Section 23 of the Income Tax Act. Hold XRP for more than a year and the gain is sold tax-free. Under a year, your personal tax rate applies, along with an exemption threshold of 1,000 euros a year. Lawmakers recently confirmed this twelve-month rule after an attempt to abolish it was rejected.
With an ETP, the classification hangs on a single contractual question, namely the delivery claim. If the product grants the right to have the underlying coins delivered, there is a strong case for treating it like direct ownership, that is, under Section 23 with the twelve-month period. Without that claim, it looks more like another form of capital claim, and then Section 20 applies, with 25 percent withholding tax plus the solidarity surcharge, with no holding period at all, but with the saver's allowance and with loss offsetting against other investment income.
This classification is a tax assessment, not settled case law. Whether a particular XRP product grants a delivery claim is stated in the prospectus and in the key information document and nowhere else. For meaningful sums, the question belongs with a tax adviser, not in a forum.
For a decision, that translates into something concrete: if you are planning on a horizon of more than a year, direct purchase with your own custody is usually the better route for tax. If you think in shorter terms, or value the withholding tax as a cap, the ETP can be the quieter solution despite its running fee. The 2.50 percent a year is no minor item: over a holding period of three years it already amounts to around seven percent of the capital deployed.
The day's news is a company story. The price at $1.39 still depends on supply of and demand for the token, not on the margins of a prime brokerage unit. Three steps follow from that for the days ahead.
October 12, with Evernorth's Nasdaq listing, is the next date that affects the token directly. Until then, $1.36 and $1.41 remain the levels against which the day is measured.
(As of October 9, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
