Crypto Firm Ripple Expands TJM Partnership

Cryptocurrency solutions company Ripple says it has expanded its partnership with broker-dealer TJM Investments.

With this collaboration, Ripple is investing in TJM and will continue to provide infrastructure to support its execution and clearing services, the companies announced Thursday (Dec. 18).

“Ripple’s multi-asset prime brokerage platform, Ripple Prime, and TJM have a long-standing relationship focused on collaboratively providing institutions high-quality trade execution, clearing, and financing,” Ripple said in a news release. “The expanded partnership with Ripple enables TJM to offer its clients improved capital and collateral efficiency as well as enhanced clearing stability and balance-sheet support.”

Beyond that, TJM expects to leverage the depth of Ripple Prime’s capabilities in digital markets, to expand its coverage into digital assets in the months ahead for its clients including hedge funds, family offices, asset managers and global investors, the release added.

Steve Beitler, co-manager for TJM, said the relationship provides his company “with the resources and infrastructure required to support the order flow we execute on behalf of counterparties, particularly as institutions increasingly seek exposure to digital assets.”

The expanded partnership comes amid what has been a busy autumn for Ripple, which recently received permission to expand its payments business in Singapore, and to use its stablecoin within ADGM, the international financial center of Abu Dhabi.

And earlier this month, the company joined forces with payment FinTech RedotPay to help extend its stablecoin payment capabilities.

In other digital asset-related news, PYMNTS wrote recently about the rise of private chains — otherwise known as permissioned distributed ledgers — within the financial sector. It’s a trend that is tough to ignore, as this sector is where much of the growth in enterprise blockchain adoption in the last two years has taken place.

For example, there was the news earlier this week that JPMorgan Chase is deepening its blockchain efforts with its first tokenized money market fund, the private “My OnChain Net Yield Fund” (MONY). This effort is supported by the banking giant’s private, permissioned tokenization platform, Kinexys Digital Assets, which isn’t a public chain.

And last week, HSBC, Swift and Ant International tested a new cross-border payment solution using the latter’s proprietary and permissioned private blockchain and HSBC’s internal tokenization platform.

“This is not a rejection of blockchain’s technical model, but an implicit posture that existing open blockchain networks are not necessarily compatible with the operational realities of regulated finance,” PYMNTS wrote.