XRP logo (Dominika Zarzycka/Getty Images)

Ripple’s token ticks up as first leveraged XRP ETF hits market

Ripple also announced it’s acquiring prime broker Hidden Road for $1.25 billion.

4/8/25 11:35AM

It’s a good day for Ripple and its native token, XRP. Just a few weeks after the SEC dropped its appeal against the company, the first-ever XRP-based ETF is hitting the market. Teucrium Investment Advisors launched a leveraged ETF linked to XRP, which starts trading today on NYSE Arca under the ticker XXRP, according to the fund’s prospectus.

Jake Hanley, managing director and senior portfolio specialist at Teucrium, said the firm is “very excited to be the first XRP-based ETF to launch in the US and under a great ticker.”

While there are a slew of spot XRP ETF filings — which are still pending SEC approval — including from Grayscale, Bitwise, Canary, 21Shares, and WisdomTree, this is the “first-ever XRP ETF on the market.” Eric Balchunas, Bloomberg senior ETF analyst, noted the “very odd” order of operations:

A 2x XRP ETF is launching tmrw in US, the first-ever XRP ETF on the market. Very odd (maybe a first) that a new asset’s first ETF is leveraged. Spot XRP still not approved, altho our odds are pretty high. Story via ⁦⁦@isabelletanlee⁩ pic.twitter.com/Eg4Wq5Y1Qi
— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) April 7, 2025

In February, Bloomberg Intelligence analysts put the odds of a spot XRP ETF approval at 65%.

When Sherwood News asked why the firm opted to launch a leveraged ETF, Hanley said that if you want exposure to XRP, you “can just go on any crypto platform and buy it.”

“We wanted something easy for double exposure,” he said, adding that this ETF met a need and that the firm has experience in leveraged vehicles.

Hanley said that this is a trading vehicle “designed for short-term, sophisticated day traders who want to position themselves to benefit from moves in XRP.”

He predicted that several other XRP derivative ETFs will hit the market “in a matter of weeks.”

“We’re happy to be first,” he said.

XRP is the fourth-largest crypto by market cap, at $114 billion, and is up 220% since a year ago.

Michael Repetny, core contributor at Marinade, said the launch underscores the growing appetite on Wall Street and among investors for more crypto ETFs.

“Altcoin ETFs, like XRP, benefit the crypto industry by introducing regulated financial products, increasing investor confidence, and potentially opening the gates to a wider range of institutional investors,” Repetny said.

In other Ripple news, the company announced this morning it’s acquiring prime broker Hidden Road for $1.25 billion, “one of the largest deals in the digital assets space,” the press release said.

Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of Ripple, wrote:

“We are at an inflection point for the next phase of digital asset adoption — the US market is effectively open for the first time due to the regulatory overhang of the former SEC coming to an end, and the market is maturing to address the needs of traditional finance. With these tailwinds, we are continuing to pursue opportunities to massively transform the space, leveraging our position and the strengths of XRP to accelerate our business and enhance our current solutions and technology.”

Sage D. Young6/16/26

Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

6/16/26

Bitcoin is “caught between flow deterioration and macro relief”

Sage D. Young6/15/26

Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Ethereum has increased more than 9% to trade above $1,800, amid BitMine Immersion Technologies acquiring $139.2 million worth of ethereum.
XRP and solana have rebounded from multiyear lows, each rising roughly 10%.
HYPE has bounced up 12%.
Dog-based memecoins dogecoin and shiba inu have chased gains of more than 4%.

“Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets,” Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were “very oversold” following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. “Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.”

“Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop that’s stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

6/15/26

Bitcoin hits highest level in 2 weeks following news of Iran deal

Bitcoin crossed $66,500 Monday morning as the broad crypto market welcomed the return of a risk-on mood.