I just saw that Ripple over here has made a major move again—Hidden Road (now called Ripple Prime) has been officially included in DTCC’s NSCC directory. This looks pretty low-key, but it’s actually quite critical for the entire ecosystem.

First, let’s talk about the background. Last year, Ripple spent $1.25 billion to acquire Hidden Road. This company is itself a global prime broker. Previously, every year it handled financing transactions for more than 300 institutional clients, with transaction volume of about $3 trillion. After the acquisition, it was renamed Ripple Prime. Now that it’s being incorporated into DTCC’s clearing system, what does that mean? It means Ripple has finally gotten a ticket into the core infrastructure of Wall Street.

I noticed that the community’s reaction to this is pretty interesting. Many people are saying that this isn’t just Ripple moving closer to traditional finance—it’s already been genuinely integrated into it. The name DTCC may be unfamiliar to retail investors, but it’s the hub of clearing and settlement for the U.S. securities market. Being included in the NSCC directory means Ripple Prime can now directly participate in the post-trade workflows used by the world’s largest financial institutions.

Even more interestingly, Ripple’s former CTO David Schwartz also confirmed this development on X, adding that the project had been in motion well before the Hidden Road acquisition. A user named SMQKE pointed out that this series of moves will significantly increase XRP’s utility—especially if Ripple Prime begins gradually migrating post-trade processes onto the XRP Ledger.

The key question now is: even if only a portion of institutional trading volume ultimately goes through a settlement system built on XRPL, it will still be a qualitative leap in the amount of blockchain activity across the entire ecosystem. This isn’t some lofty promise—it’s real infrastructure that has already been incorporated into the DTCC system. Honestly, this may be the most in-depth attempt yet by a crypto company to penetrate traditional finance.