XRP Price $1.39: Ripple Prime Funds Leveraged ETFs

The XRP price stands at $1.39 on Friday evening, around 1.9 percent higher than 24 hours earlier. The day's news, though, is not in the chart. Ripple has recently begun earning fees for funding leveraged funds on Wall Street, in a business that belonged to the banks for decades. If you hold XRP, there is one figure to know first: none of those fees reach the token itself.

Ripple Prime Funds Leveraged Funds Through Total Return Swaps

Ripple Prime is the company's investment banking arm, and it provides funding to several issuers of leveraged ETFs through what are known as total return swaps. The service is set to be extended to hedge funds and other asset managers. The Wall Street Journal reported it first on October 7, and CoinDesk picked it up on October 8.

A total return swap is an exchange between two parties. One side promises the other the entire performance of an underlying asset, meaning price gains plus distributions, and receives a running payment in return. A fund that wants to track twice the daily move of a stock therefore does not have to buy the stock itself at twice the size. It buys the performance and pays a financing fee for it. The counterparty usually hedges its own risk through share purchases or other trades and keeps the fee.