CoinDesk reported, citing an email from a Ripple spokesperson, that Asch will leave Ripple Prime at the end of the year. Kimmel will assume responsibility for the business and its team. The report did not identify a separate public announcement from Ripple about the transition.
The appointment is not a move from outside the company. Ripple’s leadership page lists Kimmel as senior vice president of Ripple Prime, while a later company release identifies him as president of the unit. That progression suggests Kimmel has already been operating close to the business’s institutional and financing activities, potentially reducing the execution risk that can accompany a change at the top of a brokerage platform.
The leadership change follows Ripple’s acquisition of Hidden Road, the institutional brokerage founded by Asch. Ripple said when it completed the acquisition on October 24, 2025 that the business would be rebranded as Ripple Prime. The company described the unit as offering multi-asset prime brokerage services and said some products would use Ripple’s RLUSD stablecoin as collateral.
That structure gives the transition importance beyond a routine executive succession. Prime brokerage sits between institutional clients and the markets where they deploy capital. Its services can include execution, clearing, financing and collateral management. Funds and trading firms depend on those functions not only to place trades, but also to manage liquidity, maintain margin and move capital between venues and asset classes.
For Ripple, the business also creates a direct connection between its stablecoin strategy and institutional market infrastructure. RLUSD is not simply positioned as a payment instrument in this model. Its use as collateral for selected prime brokerage products gives the stablecoin a role in financing and settlement workflows. Greater use in those workflows could create a path for liquidity to circulate through more parts of Ripple’s financial platform.
Ripple Prime’s expansion is already being framed in financing terms. In an August 2026 release, Ripple said Ripple Prime had closed a $275 million senior notes offering and identified Kimmel as president. The company described the unit’s growth in institutional clearing, prime brokerage and financing. The notes offering points to the capital requirements of the business and to Ripple’s willingness to fund the expansion of a regulated, infrastructure intensive brokerage operation.
That capital base matters because prime brokerage is more operationally demanding than many of the trading products that attract attention in crypto markets. A brokerage serving institutions must coordinate credit exposure, collateral, settlement and client reporting. It must also preserve confidence during periods when market liquidity is fragmented or when clients are reassessing counterparty risk. A leadership change can therefore be judged less by immediate revenue growth than by whether clients experience uninterrupted access to financing and clearing.
Asch’s departure also marks the end of the founding phase of the business. Hidden Road was built as an independent institutional brokerage before becoming part of Ripple. Under Ripple, the business has a larger corporate parent and access to a wider set of products, but it must also operate within a more integrated strategy. That creates an ongoing balance between preserving the specialized capabilities that attracted institutional clients and connecting those capabilities to Ripple’s stablecoin, custody and payments ambitions.
Kimmel’s appointment will test that balance. His existing role and his identification as president indicate continuity in the unit’s leadership structure, while Asch’s exit represents a clear change in stewardship. The immediate challenge will be maintaining client confidence as Ripple Prime expands its financing and clearing services under the Ripple brand.
The broader signal is about capital allocation. Ripple is directing resources toward the parts of crypto finance that sit closest to institutional liquidity: collateral, credit, execution and treasury infrastructure. Prime brokerage can give the company a channel into recurring institutional activity, while RLUSD can provide a settlement and collateral layer within that system.
The succession is therefore less a disruption story than an integration story. Ripple Prime is moving from a founder led brokerage into the next stage of a larger financial services platform. Whether that platform can scale will depend on its ability to keep institutional money moving efficiently while combining brokerage services with Ripple’s wider ambitions in stablecoins and market infrastructure.
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