The swaps track perpetual futures listed by Trade.xyz, a platform for stock and commodity contracts on Hyperliquid, a crypto derivatives exchange. Perpetuals have no expiry date and trade around the clock, letting a fund take a position on gold on Sunday while conventional markets are closed.
Clients deal with Ripple Prime, which manages their collateral and risk across positions, and can use Ripple’s dollar-pegged RLUSD stablecoin to back their trades. Ripple had already connected its brokerage to Hyperliquid in February.
But a fund looking to trade millions of dollars still needs someone willing to take the other side at an acceptable price, and Saturday showed how quickly weekend positions can unravel.
Nearly $52 million in leveraged chip-stock positions were forcibly closed in 10 minutes as selling spread from Binance to Hyperliquid. The shares themselves weren’t trading, leaving the contracts without fresh stock-market prices to follow, and exposing risks of participating in these newfound markets.
Meanwhile, HSBC expects early activity to lean toward firms trading price differences between markets.
“Until that depth develops, though, activity is more likely to be concentrated among market makers, proprietary traders, and hedge funds pursuing basis trades than among institutions seeking strategic hedges,” Maher wrote. Basis trades try to profit from price gaps between related positions, such as a contract and the asset it tracks.
