Asheesh Birla spent twelve years building Ripple before leaving the blockchain company in October last year. He didn't go far. The company he founded that same month, Evernorth, is built arou
Asheesh Birla spent twelve years building Ripple before leaving the blockchain company in October last year. He didn't go far.
The company he founded that same month, Evernorth, is built around XRP, the token Ripple is synonymous with, and its backers include Ripple itself, alongside Kraken, SBI Holdings, Pantera Capital and Arrington Capital.
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse advises the firm.
Editor's Inputs: "Ripple and XRP are distinct. Ripple is a private company; XRP is an independent cryptocurrency that Ripple holds and uses."
Related: Ripple releases 1 billion XRP from escrow as October kicks off
On Oct. 8, that company is expected to start trading on Nasdaq under a ticker that spells out the entire business plan: XRPN.
Birla joined Ripple's founding team in 2013 to build its product suite, rose to general manager of RippleNet, the company's cross-border payments network, and later sat on Ripple's board. Before crypto, he had already founded and sold a content company to Thomson Reuters, and Fortune put him on its Ledger 40 under 40 list in 2018.
Evernorth is an XRP treasury company, a business whose core strategy is holding a cryptocurrency on its balance sheet so that investors can buy the stock instead of the token.
MicroStrategy, now known as Strategy, made the model famous with Bitcoin.
Evernorth is running the same playbookwith XRP. Buy XRPN shares in a regular brokerage account and you own a slice of a corporate pile of XRP, no crypto exchange or wallet required.
At closing, that pile is expected to hold approximately 473 million XRP, worth roughly $700 million at current prices.
"Going public will offer investors a regulated, transparent way to own XRP exposure and participate in the growth of the blockchain economy," Birla said.
Evernorth is not doing a traditional IPO. It is merging with Armada Acquisition Corp. II (Nasdaq: AACI), a special purpose acquisition company, a shell that is already listed and exists solely to take a real business public through a merger. It is the fast lane to a ticker, and crypto firms have used it often.
The paperwork took most of a year.
Evernorth filed with the SEC in March, cleared the regulator in August, and on Tuesday Armada announced that shareholders approved the merger.
The deal is expected to deliver about $300 million in gross cash proceeds, with related private placements raising over $1 billion, much of it contributed in XRP rather than dollars. The combined company will operate as Evernorth Holdings, Inc.
Evernorth is not the first public company to park XRP on its balance sheet. As of this year, eight public companies have disclosed XRP treasury strategies with collective commitments above $2 billion. The difference is scale, and the fact that for the others, XRP is a side bet attached to an existing business.
Evernorth's roughly $1 billion in placements would make it the largest public XRP treasury, ahead of Trident Digital ($500M), Webus ($300M), VivoPower ($100M) and Wellgistics ($50M). Figures are announced commitments.The club so far:
Those figures are announced commitments rather than today's market value of their holdings, and several are still being deployed.
Evernorth's roughly $1 billion in placements and 473 million XRP at closing would make it larger than the rest of the club combined, and it is the only one whose entire business is the treasury itself.
Meanwhile, XRP, the cryptocurrency returned 43.3% in the third quarter, per CryptoRank, edging out even Bitcoin's record-setting 42.71%. XRP was trading at $1.50 at the time of writing, about 59% below the $3.65 peak it reached in July of last year.
Related: XRP could rally 10% if this key level breaks, analyst says
