Cryptocurrency firms are increasingly turning to the world of traditional finance for their next leg of growth by positioning themselves as competitors to Wall Street’s entrenched institutional businesses.

The prime brokerage division of Ripple — the parent company that is best known for its ties to the XRP token — is rolling out perpetual swaps linked to real-world assets for institutional clients, seeking to capitalize on growing demand for the leveraged, no-expiry contracts.

The offering from the unit, Ripple Prime, comes with more than 100 reference markets spanning stocks, various indexes, ETFs, commodities and more, and comes as alternative 24/7 trading venues such as Hyperliquid continue to gain mainstream popularity. Ripple’s new product — via Trade.xyz, the largest trading venue for perps tied to traditional assets on Hyperliquid — builds on its February move to allow clients to trade crypto-perp futures.

The launch shows how crypto firms are trying to turn their always-on trading infrastructure into a broader institutional business. Rather than simply offering exposure to digital assets, companies such as Ripple Prime are moving into the prime-brokerage functions long dominated by banks and Wall Street intermediaries: financing trades, linking venues and helping clients use collateral across positions.

Ripple Prime’s arrangement allows for cross-margining — a process by which funds in an account are shared across multiple positions — which could help the institutions it’s working with deploy more capital and manage positions in a more efficient way, according to Michael Higgins, the unit’s international chief executive officer.

“It’s another liquidity source for those institutions to get access to these products,” but on a “more regulated” infrastructure, Higgins said in an interview.

Trading volumes in real-world-asset perpetual swaps have surged this year, drawing rising interest from traditional market makers and hedge funds that deploy sophisticated trading strategies. Across a handful of major trading venues, open interest in contracts tied to so-called RWAs has gone from virtually nothing to $9 billion over the past year.

Higgins said clients are using the contracts in different ways. Some are putting on a basis trade, pairing the perp with the underlying asset to profit from the price gap while limiting exposure to broader market moves. Others are using the contracts to make outright bets on where prices are headed.

“There are institutions that want to get just exposure to these assets out of hours and over weekends, when they have a view and want to express that,” he said. “Now they have a regulated way of getting into that market.”Higgins also added that traditional hedge funds are “very close” to accessing tokenized real-world assets directly.

“It’s all about building the infrastructure that is familiar and acceptable from a counterparty perspective, from an AML perspective,” he said, referencing the shorthand for anti-money laundering. “And that’s why we’re really focused on that segment of the market.”