Ripple's prime-brokerage unit Hidden Road has secured $200 million in financing from Neuberger Berman, the asset manager confirmed in a Bloomberg report cited by Cointelegraph on May 11. The capital is earmarked for expanding margin trading services across traditional and digital markets, giving institutional clients a single venue to finance positions in equities, fixed income, FX, and crypto.
The deal lands roughly a year after Ripple completed its $1.25 billion acquisition of Hidden Road. It is the first time a major asset manager of Neuberger Berman's size has been publicly tied to a margin facility at a crypto-affiliated prime broker.
A TradFi name backing a crypto-adjacent venue
Neuberger Berman manages around $500 billion in client assets across equities, fixed income, private markets, and alternatives. The firm has run multi-strategy credit and private debt mandates for institutional clients since the 1930s, and its participation here is a credit relationship rather than an equity investment in Ripple or Hidden Road.
Cointelegraph framed the financing as a margin facility, meaning the capital is used to fund client positions rather than to buy a stake in the prime broker itself. That distinction matters. Margin facilities are commonplace in equities prime brokerage, but they have been scarce in crypto because most large banks still treat crypto-collateralized lending as outside their risk appetite.
A $200 million facility is modest against Neuberger's overall book, but it is meaningful capacity for a prime broker that is trying to cross-collateralize positions across asset classes for hedge funds and trading firms.
Hidden Road inside Ripple
Ripple acquired Hidden Road in 2025 for $1.25 billion in what was, at the time, one of the largest crypto-adjacent acquisitions of the cycle. Hidden Road was already operating as a prime brokerage with clients in both traditional and digital markets, and the deal gave Ripple direct exposure to institutional trading flow that does not depend on XRP usage.
The strategic logic for Ripple has been to position Hidden Road as a venue that clears, finances, and reports across asset types so that a hedge fund running a long-short equity book alongside a basis trade in BTC futures can post one collateral pool against both. That is the model the Neuberger Berman facility appears to support.
For comparison, XRP traded at $1.45 on May 11, up 2.3% on the day and 4.4% on the week, with crypto markets broadly flat: BTC at $81,096 (+0.4%), ETH at $2,333 (+0.5%), and a Fear & Greed reading of 51 (neutral) at the time of writing. The Hidden Road news is structural rather than price-moving.
Cross-asset margin is the prize
Cross-asset margin is one of the more durable competitive moats in institutional trading. If a hedge fund can net its long equity exposure against a short futures position and a BTC perp hedge under a single agreement, its capital efficiency improves materially compared to running three siloed margin accounts.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan have all built cross-margining systems for equities and derivatives, but their crypto exposure has been limited. Crypto-native prime brokers like FalconX, Galaxy, and Hidden Road have been pushing in the other direction, starting from digital assets and expanding into traditional markets.
A Neuberger Berman facility at Hidden Road sits squarely on that competitive line. It signals that at least one large traditional asset manager is willing to extend credit against a book that mixes digital and traditional collateral types, which is the kind of comfort that drives larger institutional flow to a venue.
Read against the broader month
The financing follows several other institutional crypto stories in May. Morgan Stanley's MSBT spot bitcoin product gathered $194 million in its first month with zero outflow days. Crypto funds pulled in $858 million on CLARITY Act optimism. The pattern is a steady drip of traditional financial firms taking measured positions in crypto-adjacent infrastructure rather than headline equity stakes.
A $200 million margin line is the kind of plumbing story that does not move spot prices but materially expands the size of book a prime broker can support. Hidden Road's clients, mostly hedge funds and proprietary trading firms, are the marginal buyers of crypto liquidity on most days.
Overview
Neuberger Berman is providing Hidden Road with a $200 million facility to expand cross-asset margin trading. The deal does not change Ripple's ownership of Hidden Road or the prime broker's day-to-day operations, but it adds a sizeable traditional credit line to a venue that already clears across equities, fixed income, FX, and crypto. For institutional traders, it widens the pool of capital available to finance multi-asset positions through a single prime broker.
