Ripple’s growing presence inside traditional financial infrastructure is attracting attention after analyst Rob Cunningham laid out a scenario in which the company’s expanding institutional business could eventually connect with a small portion of the enormous transaction flow moving through the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC).
Cunningham argued that the opportunity is much broader than XRP alone. In his view, Ripple has assembled an institutional stack spanning prime brokerage, custody, stablecoin settlement, blockchain infrastructure, payments and treasury management. If those businesses become increasingly connected to institutions operating through traditional market infrastructure, even a tiny percentage of the surrounding financial activity could become significant.
There is now a tangible connection behind the discussion. A June DTCC notice lists Hidden Road Partners CIV US LLC, part of Ripple Prime, with the identifier RIPL and a first trade date of June 26.
But the numbers circulating around this story require careful interpretation. There is no announcement that DTCC will route trillions (or quadrillions) through Ripple, XRP or XRPL.
What Cunningham is presenting is a model of the potential opportunity if Ripple can connect more of its services to institutions participating in these enormous markets.
What you'll learn 👉
Ripple Prime Gives Ripple a Direct Link to Traditional Markets
The foundation of the argument is Ripple’s acquisition of Hidden Road.
Ripple completed the acquisition in October 2025 and rebranded the business as Ripple Prime, creating a multi-asset institutional prime brokerage operation covering areas including digital assets, foreign exchange, derivatives, swaps and fixed income.
Ripple says Prime currently clears more than $3 trillion annually across markets and serves more than 300 institutional customers.
That matters because Ripple is no longer approaching institutional finance exclusively as a blockchain payments company.
It now owns infrastructure already operating within conventional financial markets.
The DTCC notice adds another piece to that story. Hidden Road Partners CIV US LLC appears in an NSCC directory update with the RIPL identifier, connecting a Ripple-owned regulated brokerage entity to DTCC’s clearing infrastructure.
That is considerably different from saying that DTCC has adopted Ripple technology.
Still, it provides context for why Cunningham believes the opportunity deserves attention.
CoxDTCC + Ripple = Important Note
— Rob Cunningham (@KuwlShow) September 3, 2026
Over the next 24 months, DTCC could reasonably process $11 -$14 quadrillion cumulatively, while Ripple gains the opportunity to connect its prime brokerage, custody, stablecoin, treasury, payments and blockchain services directly to institutions… pic.twitter.com/tCdQdAYcr6
DTCC Processes Around $4 Quadrillion Annually
The scale of DTCC is difficult to overstate.
DTCC itself said in May that it settles roughly $4 quadrillion each year, while discussing the enormous scalability and risk-management requirements involved in bringing tokenization into institutional markets.
Cunningham takes that existing scale and models what could happen over the coming two years.
He estimates that DTCC could process roughly $11 trillion to $14 quadrillion cumulatively over the next 24 months, with the upper end depending on increased turnover and greater utilization of existing assets.
More importantly, he isn’t arguing that Ripple will process all of it.
His thesis is that Ripple could have opportunities to provide services to institutions touching portions of that activity.
That’s an important distinction for XRP holders.
The multi-quadrillion-dollar figures describe the scale of the broader financial infrastructure, not projected XRP transaction volume.
Cunningham Sees Seven Parts to Ripple’s Institutional Strategy
Cunningham’s thesis revolves around seven pieces of Ripple’s business: Ripple Prime, Ripple Custody, RLUSD, XRP, XRP Ledger, Ripple Payments and Ripple Treasury.
Rather than viewing those businesses separately, he sees them as components of an integrated financial infrastructure.
An institution could theoretically need brokerage and financing through Ripple Prime, custody infrastructure for digital assets, RLUSD for stablecoin liquidity, XRP for bridge liquidity where appropriate, XRPL for certain blockchain functions, Ripple Payments for moving value internationally and treasury infrastructure for managing corporate liquidity.
That creates what Cunningham describes as a commercial loop running from origination and tokenization through custody, financing, trading, collateral, conversion, settlement and reconciliation.
Parts of that integration are already visible.
Ripple said after completing the Hidden Road acquisition that RLUSD was already being used as collateral for several prime brokerage products. It also said certain derivatives customers had chosen to hold balances in RLUSD.
Ripple previously announced that Hidden Road would migrate post-trade activity to XRPL as part of the integration.
Those are much more concrete developments than simply assuming every Ripple product will automatically benefit from DTCC activity.
Why Cunningham Thinks AI Could Make the Opportunity Even Bigger
Another interesting part of Cunningham’s analysis concerns artificial intelligence.
Rather than claiming AI will somehow create trillions of dollars of new assets, he argues that its bigger effect could come from making existing capital more productive.
AI systems could increasingly optimize collateral placement, margin requirements, liquidity sourcing, execution and settlement.
Cunningham estimates existing turnover at around 41 times and models what happens if that rises to 50, 60 or 70 times.
Under his calculations, 50x turnover would correspond to roughly $5.7 quadrillion annually, 60x to $6.84 quadrillion, and 70x to nearly $8 quadrillion.
These figures are scenarios, not DTCC forecasts.
But they illustrate his broader point: the future of financial infrastructure may involve not only tokenizing more assets, but allowing existing assets and collateral to move and settle more efficiently.
DTCC itself is pursuing tokenization. The organization has described tokenization as moving from experimentation toward production and has been developing tokenized collateral infrastructure for institutional markets.
Ripple Doesn’t Need a Large Percentage for the Numbers to Become Huge
This is arguably the most compelling part of Cunningham’s thesis.
Ripple doesn’t need to capture anything close to all of DTCC’s activity for the addressable opportunity to become substantial.
Using Cunningham’s modeled $6 trillion–$8 quadrillion annual flow scenario, even fractions of a percentage would represent enormous underlying transaction values.
But there is another distinction XRP holders need to understand.
Connected financial flow is not the same as Ripple revenue, and neither is automatically equivalent to XRP demand.
If Ripple Prime clears a transaction, that doesn’t necessarily mean XRP is involved.
If an institution uses Ripple Custody, XRP doesn’t necessarily have to be involved.
Even if RLUSD becomes increasingly important inside Ripple Prime, that doesn’t mean the same dollar value must pass through XRP.
Cunningham himself qualifies XRP’s role as bridge liquidity “where selected.”
That qualification matters.
What This Could Mean for XRP
For XRP holders, the strongest part of this story isn’t the headline-grabbing quadrillion-dollar number.
It’s the infrastructure Ripple has assembled around institutional finance.
Ripple Prime alone gives the company exposure to a business clearing more than $3 trillion annually. Ripple has custody infrastructure, payments products, RLUSD, XRPL and XRP alongside that prime brokerage operation.
The question is whether Ripple can make those components increasingly interconnected.
If institutional customers begin using several parts of the stack simultaneously, Ripple could create something more difficult for competitors to replicate than any single product.
XRP could benefit where institutions specifically require neutral bridge liquidity or where XRPL-based markets create additional demand for the asset.
But that remains conditional.
There is currently no basis for claiming that a fixed percentage of DTCC’s transaction volume will flow through XRP, or that trillions in DTCC activity translates directly into the XRP price.
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